


sic itur ad astra

by powelli



Category: The Creatures | Cow Chop RPF
Genre: M/M, Multi, Science Fiction, maniac au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-10 18:16:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15954845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powelli/pseuds/powelli
Summary: “Houston, this is the USS Hermes reporting  a successful gravitational stabilisation, over.”No response. Not even static.“Houston, come in. This is the USS Hermes, reporting a successful gravitation stabilisation, over.”And then the lights went out. Not in a bulbs-smashing, aliens-attacking sort of way, but in a huge whirr that shook the spacecraft until the lights simultaneously shut off in a slight ani-climax. James startled.“Oh… fuck,” he said shortly.-or, james really, really, really hates space.





	1. loud and clear

 “Could I get an update on the power levels of the imaging spectrograph? Over,”

A faint scoff came through the suit’s headphones, followed by a dry, “Yeah. Standby.”

James let his arms drift away from the inner workings of the Hubble as he awaited the response, eyes giving the progress a brief once-over. He guessed that if he kept going at this rate – assuming that it was even the correct solution to a problem they couldn’t even identify – it would be done by tomorrow night. They could be on Earth by the morning after. It only took two hundred and forty one days. Idly, he tilted his head to stare at the surface of the Earth, approximately two hundred and forty miles beneath them.

The scorching blues and greens almost hurt to look at, but Japan was just beneath him. It was night over there - maybe reaching ten pm. They were just starting their work day on the Hermes and he had no doubt that employees were piling into the NASA headquarters as they spoke. The thought perplexed him. To think there were people not so far away going about their normal lives with no real recognition or understanding towards the people in the sky who practically saved their asses every day.

“Wilson, you there? Over.”

The voice startled James, and he fumbled to grab his tether connecting him both to the Hubble and to the Hermes in order to turn himself back around and to face to Hubble’s surface. The sudden tug almost caused him to wind himself as he threw himself slightly too forcefully against the Hubble. He gasped for air for a short moment before regaining his breath, realising he hadn’t died, and turned his focus back onto Brett.

“Uh, yeah. I’m - I’m here. Go ahead. Over,” He responded and took a breath before beginning to peer at the spectrograph closer. He couldn’t spot any discernible external flaws. He had checked for them countless times, much to Asher’s clear amusement, who had insisted it was an internal issue from the outset.

“I can’t report any difference in power levels. Over,” Brett responded, and there was a bit of fumbling on the line before it cut out. James considered calling a _stuck mike_ just to show off, but it didn’t seem imperative compared to the dismay that sentence caused.

“Uh. Shit, okay. I’m gonna read out a sequence – advise ready to copy. Over,” he replied after a pause, already going over the pattern in his head. Once, then twice, then thrice.

There was a beat in communications, and James briefly wondered where Lindsey was until Brett came back on the line.

“Yep, ready to copy. Over.”

James took a breath and stared at the spectrograph for a moment. He had elected to transfer the different panels within it to letters of the alphabet (seeing as there were 26 panels anyway) to keep track of the ones he wanted to troubleshoot first by order of which he suspected where the most damaged.

“Tango, Romeo, Foxtrot, Bravo, Whiskey, Lima, Echo,” He listed. And then, as if he had forgotten, “Over.”

There was a great pause on the line and he could faintly hear the scrawling of pencil on paper from Brett’s end, punctuated by the definitive tap of a pencil on paper. He really hoped Brett got it right this time – only a few days ago Brett made an error on the notation of the order of a series of panels causing the repairs to be delayed by two days. Lindsey had not been especially pleased about that.

Brett spoke up again, “Roger. Ready to head inside when able? We have that Q&A at 10. Over.”

James just knew that he was probably reclining in mid-air right now, eating cereal cubes out of thick ration packaging. Somehow, he was jealous. Brett was a science officer, meaning he maybe went on spacewalks once every two months or so when additional assistance was required, but he mostly elected to stay cooped up in his cramped lab until he was called for lunch or dinner.

“Uh, yeah,” Lindsey finally came into view from the left side of the Hermes, propelled by the jetpack on her back of which James was strictly forbidden from using on account of his tendency to fly into things and also to practically drain the fuel trying to do flips. Houston had not been happy to have to send up more fuel on their 50th day of being up there. “I’ll see you in a few, Brett.”

And so he began to patch up the Hubble once more.

A few minutes later, he grumbled as he watched yet another screw float away into deep space which marked the fourth one in the hour. It pissed him off, to say the least. Two hundred and forty one days in space and he couldn’t even remember that things don’t… fall.

Lindsey slowed to what wasn’t quite a halt and more of a slow drift at his side and he raised his gaze to look at her voice rang in his ears when she spoke through his headset, neatly tucked under an off-white cap.

“Need any help?” she asked, veering away and gently moving to James’ other side. She almost bumped the rig James was set up in – a sort of robot arm keeping him tethered to the Hubble as he took apart each panel and tried to figure out what exactly had gone wrong with the damn thing. The push made him startle; he had always kind of been wary about staying tethered to and near the shuttle when doing spacewalks. But he got over the second mild scare and continued to tighten the final screw on the panel.

“Nah,” James responded, screwing in yet another screw and scoffing when it just slipped right out again. He gently placed it on the surface of the rig’s arm and hardly noticed when it started floating away again. “We should probably start heading inside soon anyway. We have that thing at, uh, ten, I think, Brett said.

“You’re right. Arizona, I’m pretty sure,” She said quietly, almost cutting herself off with a cautious “Whoops,” and pushing herself forward to grab the lost screw. She retrieved it in a gloved hand and held it out to James, who took it with a small laugh. He would be lying to say he wasn’t embarrassed. Lindsey was a sort of legend in the aerospace field; she had been the youngest commanding officer ever and had beaten a variety of records held by astronauts back in the sixties and seventies.

This, however, was James’ first time in space.

“I guess I’m still kind of used to things, you know, _not floating out into deep space_. Or whatever,” he mumbled. And then, louder, “Thanks.”

“No problem. Want to duct tape that panel down and get inside?” she offered, gesturing to the airlock a ways behind her. “I’ll let you hitch a ride on the jetpack.”

“Really?” James barked through a laugh, already reaching for his duct tape.

“Absolutely not,”

So it was ten minutes later that the crew found themselves in the primary ‘lounge’ on the Hermes, if it could even be called that. It _was_ the biggest room on the Hermes aside from the engine room, but the space was filled with medically blue chairs fitted with seatbelts and a coffee table bolted to the ground. The room had a huge window from which the Hubble could be seen, just out of view of. The walls were decorated with drawings they had been sent from NASA, marked with kids’ names from across the country who had read or heard or learned about them. A little ways down was the small shared gym. The room opened from the right, where there was an open door leading to the more mechanical hallway, filled with cables and pieces of machinery James couldn’t even identify fully.

“Allie from Scottsdale, aged 9, asks what we do in our free time,” Lindsey read out from the crew’s shared tablet. James kicked off the wall, drifting across the view of the small camera set up and streaming to thousands of schoolkids in their classrooms. Brett was standing to the right of Lindsey, and a ways behind him was Asher, seemingly tinkering with some sort of mechanic in his hands. “Guess I could answer that first,” she began, lowering the device. “I… like to read, and NASA are nice enough to supply us with enough TV shows and movies to last years and years. Uh, anyone else?”

Brett raised his head. “Oh, yeah. I like to work out – a little behind us are the treadmills we use,” he tilted to the left so that the treadmills were slightly in frame. “And, well. I like to see how many drops of water I can catch in my mouth in a minute, and you know, I think we’re aiming to beat a world record here.”

Asher finally quit fidgeting with the compact piece of machinery he seemed to be attempting to fix and drifted further into the foreground. “I like to listen to music and a lot of the times I just look at Earth,” he answered in a calm voice. “It’s cool.”

“I… don’t really do much,” James said through a smile. “I guess I like to just browse Twitter…? We basically are living on a satellite, so the internet connection is pretty fu-“ he cleared his throat. “It’s great. Fast.”

“…That’s true. And all of us use our free time to contact friends or family down on Earth, just like how you FaceTime your friends. And that’s pretty much it,” Lindsey concluded. “Thanks for the question, Allie. Our next question is from Sebastian in Phoenix, aged 11. He asks what we eat in space.”

“I can answer that,” James said. “It’s a lot of what you might have in your cupboard at home, except NASA make it extra disgusting for their astronauts.”

The crew collectively chuckled, before Brett began talking again. “Well, yeah, it is a lot of normal food. But it is basically frozen and then all the air is – _whoosh –_ sucked out of it,” He punctuated the noise with a quick swish of his hand, before reaching into an overhead cupboard and withdrawing a thin silver pouch with his name printed on it in bold letters. “And then they package them and ship them up to us every few months.”

“Alright, so this one is from Kayley also from Phoenix, who asks,” and then Lindsey chuckles and lowers the phone. “How do astronauts use the toiler?”

-

James watched as Lindsey switched off the camera after a lengthy goodbye. As soon as the tablet confirmed that the stream was over, it was turned off and put aside to charge, and the crew began to disband for their respective jobs. But they did linger for a moment, muttering quips about some of the more ridiculous questions they had received.

Houston joined in halfway through Asher laughing about one of the kids’ names (The crew could barely stifle their amusement at a kid named McKarty) with a small commandment.

“Good Q&A, Hermes. Continue with your ascribed jobs for the rest of the day. Over.”

James groaned at that, running a hand over his face in disdain. They couldn’t get _one_ day off. And he knew that it cost like a billion dollars for every hour they were up here but Jesus, he hasn’t had a day off once since getting up here. It seemed he wasn’t the only one annoyed – Asher was muttering to himself about something, and Brett and Lindsey seemed to be in a deep rant with each other which was abruptly interrupted by Lindsey raising her voice and directing it at the AI of the Hermes.

“CEVA, could you tell me the time?”

There was about a second long pause before CEVA briskly responded in a clear female voice, cheery enough to almost soothe James’ irritation.

“It is currently one-seventeen PM in Houston, Texas. Would you like a different timezone?

“No thanks,” Lindsey responded, already pushing off the nearest wall and gliding down the hall, headed for the airlock. She was silent as she swooped through the air, using her arms to push herself along with relative ease. Once she reached the airlock, she paused and looked back at the crew. Asher was already moving down after her. He would join them for this shift. Brett seemed to be headed for the lab. “Oh, and guys, remember; automatic reset of the zero G starts today so for the next hundred or so days – if we’re not back before then – will be spent in a fully earth-gravitational atmosphere on board. I think it’ll hit-“

“At four PM,” quipped CEVA.

“Yep,” Lindsey confirmed, pressing some buttons on a dialpad opposite the airlock.

“But I just finished taping all of my equipment to the tables…” James could hear Brett mumble jokingly, followed by a sharp laugh from Asher before the doors to the long corridor on board shut behind him.

“Hey, James?” Lindsey spoke up, leaning back when the dialpad gave an affirmative beep. “How’s your oxygen levels doing?” She was referring to the spacesuit. When they were called in for the Q&A it had been at about 77%, so James could only guess it wasn’t brilliant.

“Uh, in the seventies-ish. Want me to, uh, switch that tank out?”

“No, should be alright,” she calmly answered and began to twist the valve for the airlock. It swung open and a cool rush of air hit them, before she floated in. She shed her MIT sweater and reached out to attach it to a Velcro strip on the wall – a sort of coat peg alternative for zero G – leaving her in a plain shirt and some leggings. Standard NASA uniform for spacewalks. James himself just had the branded shirt on and a pair of ugly shorts, sort of like basketball shorts but much more fitted. He hated them, but they were ideal for this sort of thing. Asher had something similar on, but had opted for a simple vest and – Asher refused to call them tights but, in their essence, – tights.

They stepped into the astronaut suits in comfortable silence. It took about ten minutes to get the damn thing on, and that didn’t count double and triple and quadruple checks that there were no rips or holes or loose seams in the suit. Even so, just before they closed the first set of doors and prepared for the oxygen to drain in the airlock, Lindsey grabbed the base of their helmets and shook them, ensuring they were properly clasped to the suits. It reminded him of how rollercoaster operators would test out the handles on rides with a quick shake. It just made him feel a bit better and he figured Lindsey knew that.

When the oxygen on the airlock’s diagnostics read 0%, the door leading to the outside opened.

No matter how many times he did this, he was still floored by the vastness of it all.

They stayed up there for another two hours of work. It was somewhat rare for Lindsey and Asher to be out on a spacewalk simultaneously – normally the jobs of the day were separated by shifts. James really never had shifts, per say. He was only on board as a mission specialist – to fix the shuttle. Nobody else could do it but, to be fair, he did practically help invent the module that could repair the Hubble.

“Have I ever told you guys about my trip to Hawaii?” Asher drawled through the speakers.

James, in the middle of carefully rearranging an entire module, thought for a moment. He could faintly hear Lindsey some ways in the distance, probably climbing on the surface of the Hermes, checking each airlock. It was a unnecessary precaution, but it was always nice to have. Asher was trying to patch up some faulty modules on the Hubble – nothing too serious, but parts that needed slight revamping.

“Probably. Houston, link to communications card ready for data reception,” he stated, lifting his gaze to scan the surface of the Earth as he waited for a response. Houston were always listening in one way or another. James didn’t mind. They were friendly enough.

“Roger,” responded a light female voice. “Is this the tattoo story, Asher?”

“Nah, that’s already been done,” Asher said. “Thought you knew me better than this, Houston.”

“Booting comms card now. Confirm link, please.” James interrupted.

He waited for what seemed like forever, hands poised just above the mechanical surgery he had been executing for the past eight or so months. That _had_ to be some sort of record.

“Yeah, that’s a negative. Not seeing anything.” Came the voice from ground control.

Shit.

“Okay. Standby, Houston. Gonna reboot that comms card.”

James heaved a sigh and got to work again, removing the comms card with careful hands and turning it over once, then twice, before he found the small panel he had to unscrew to get to the reset option, a small button located somewhere between those inner workings.

“Gotta say, Houston. I gotta bad feeling about this mission.” The statement was serious enough, but James could hear the smile in Asher’s voice as he said it, and although there was no immediate response from Houston, the resentment in the silence was clear enough.

“Please expand,” deadpanned the voice from down below.

“Okay, so the year is 2012. I was fresh-faced and just out of the academy – already up in space. I had been there for forty-five days. Every time I passed over Colorado, I’m lookin’ down, knowing that my girlfriend is there, waitin’ for me. I’m blowing kisses down there. Then we land, and she’s gone. Ran off with a lawyer – can you believe that? – so, I pack my car, and I head to –“

“Honolulu. Houston has heard this one, unfortunately. Requesting fuel status on the jetpack prototype, Lieutenant Washburn.”

Lindsey’s voice crackled a bit before it came through clearly.

“I’m showing forty percent drain,” she responds. “Engineering did well with this one – remember last time? That one nearly got me lost in deep space.”

“Engineering say thank you.”

“Okay, Houston, have you heard the one where I got a nipple piercing? Hurt like hell, you know, but-“

“We know the piercing story, Asher.”

Asher scoffed. “Even engineering?”

“ _Especially_ engineering.”

James looks up. He had gotten to the reset button within the comms card, and was hovering over the small amber button before he pressed it. Nothing happened, of course. It’s not like James could hear any sort of indication of it working, like a whirr, but he had to assume that _something_ had surely happened.

“Comms card reboot in progress,” He updated, gently beginning to place the card back in.

Lindsey appeared over the Hermes, and with her, came the beginning of music. Lieutenant Washburn tended to like to play music whilst on spacewalks. When James had asked her why on one particularly dark Wednesday night, she had simply said that she hated the silence in space.

So, when the beginning notes of Aretha Franklin’s ‘ _Respect_ ’ came through as tinny audio on James’ headset, he hardly complained.

“You shouldn’t let Asher keep telling you stories, Houston,” she joked, propelling through the air and towards James. “He’s runnin’ out fast.”

“Comms card reboot complete. Confirm link?” James tried. God, he hoped it was correct.

“Hubble telescope engaged. Upgrade fully functional. Congratulations, Hermes.”

James sighed in relief, finally withdrawing from the system and leaning back. He guessed they would touch down as soon as they could – hopefully, anyway. Lindsey drifted closer, slowing down close to James with a wide smile, barely visible through the thick glass of her helmet but definitely there. Over the comms, he could hear Asher laughing and a distant applause from ground control. He felt his chest swell in pride.

“Good job, crew. Kick back and take the rest of the day off, we’ll aim to complete all system updates by Monday evening.”

James grinned at that and hastily began to patch up the panel, only moving his gaze when he heard copious amounts of humming and excited little sounds from Asher who would appear to be dancing as best he could whilst trying to patch up the module he was working on. The dancing wasn’t any good, to any extent. Dancing in space was hard enough, and dancing in the chunky spacesuits was even harder. But he seemed happy, and Lindsey was chuckling along as she watched.

“James, do you have a visual on what exactly Asher is doing up there?”

He squinted.

“Ah… I dunno – some sort of abstract dance, I think.”

“Of course,” Houston replied shortly. There was a beat of static noise, before the voice came back. “Hey, Dr. Wilson-“ James scrunched up his nose at the title. It made him oddly uncomfortable. “-Medical are concerned about your ECG readings.”

Resisting the urge to scoff was hard. Medical seemed to always be concerned about _something._

“I feel fine, Houston. Great.”

The panel cover wasn’t staying on. Begrudgingly, James hit it with a closed fist, not hard enough to hurt or dent, but enough for it to shift on it’s screws and sort of fit. He couldn’t exactly leave the panel open. James leant closer to inspect the screws. Could be the top left – it looked slightly bent. Maybe he would have to replace it. With a annoyed hum, he began to unscrew it again.

“Medical won’t accept that. You feeling nauseous?” Houston asked.

James sighed for real this time. The screw wasn’t bent at all. It could be an internal problem – something wouldn’t let the panel close properly from the inside. With a slight eye roll, he started on the other three screws.

“Nope. Diagnostics are …all in the green. Nothing wrong here, guys.” The last screw came out and was stored with the other three in James’ left fist. The panel slowly left the surface of the Hubble, not quite floating away but hovering above the work. James pushed it away, not too far, and began to stare at the inner workings. Something could be lodged in the outer parts of the module, but he couldn’t focus with the music blaring in his ears.

“Medical are reporting a heartrate rise and a temperature drop to thirty-three-point-one. They’re requesting you return to the Hermes, Dr. Wilson,”

“Yeah, that’s a negative. I’m finishing this thing,” James ran his hand down the inner rim of the module, feeling for any loose objects or faulty compartments. Nothing. He grabbed the panel and tried to press it down onto the open module – nothing. Something was stopping it from clicking into place, but he couldn’t focus until he had just a bit of quiet. “Houston, could you please turn that music off?”

“Washburn.”

“Sure,” Lindsey said, and the music cut out abruptly afterwards.

“Thanks,”

James scowled at the panel, batting it away and attempting to find the issue. He ran his hand down the sides once, twice, and then thrice. Nothing. And then he turned the panel over. Lo and behold, on the top left corner, was a ridiculously mundane folded strip of duct tape probably left there from a prior mission taped to the inside. James removed it incredulously, and then fitted the panel, screwing it in without issue.

“Hey, Wilson, could you give engineering a rough estimate for the time needed to install all updates?”

James thought for a moment. There _were_ a lot of updates, and he was just one guy. A few modules still had to be replaced, too.

“Maybe a day. Well, longer, probably.”

“Fine. Installing your system in the Hubble is the purpose of this mission and so we appreciate your patience, Doctor,”

“Oh yeah? Well, I’m flattered, Houston.”

“As for you, Washburn. As I understand, this is your last mission.”

“Yep. I think I’ve seen it all up here. I’ll miss it, though.” Lindsey mused, and James suddenly felt sort of sad. Leading up to the mission, he read up on Lieutenant Washburn’s Wikipedia hundreds of times out of sheer anxiety for meeting and working with such a legend in such a competitive field. To hear that she would no longer be attending missions… sucked. “You think I could break that spacewalking record?” She tried.

“Checking…” Houston responded, and James could barely see Lindsey shake her head through her helmet. “Seems you’re just-“

“Fifty-two minutes short.”

“Precisely,” The voice from down below coughed. “Houston just wants to say that it’s been a privilege working with you. Enjoy your last walk.”

“Thank you. Am I go to assist Dr. Wilson in returning to the Hermes?”

“That’d be appreciated.” James responded.

So he waited there, running a gloved hand over the now flat-ish surface of the Hubble, over the faulty panel all the way to the point where he could no longer reach. Lindsey eventually drifted over, and began to unhatch James from the robotic arm keeping him connected to the Hubble. Then, she detached his tether clipped to the ladder of the Hubble and connected it to herself.

“You ready?”

“Uh, I guess.”

Lindsey pushed forwards. And, as much as James hated to admit it, he hated this part. No matter how much they did it, the sensation of being flown through open space, jerked along by a tether, terrified him. He was told it was normal – many astronauts had nausea and anxiety over being practically thrown into a spacecraft – speaking of which, here came the worst part. Lindsey suddenly halted, but the momentum of James being pulled along behind her propelled him forwards, right into the exterior of the Hermes.

He was fine. His hands grappled for something to hang onto, and he eventually found the ladder on the surface on the Hermes. Lindsey hovered beside him as he regained his breath and, slowly but surely, began to crawl across the Hermes. A cold sweat had broken out on his back although he knew that even if he happened to slip or let go or otherwise mess up he would only drift about three metres before the tether pulled him right back. He would be okay.

It took about twenty minutes of crawling along the Hermes for them to reach the airlock. Lindsey was the one to open the hatch. The door clicked open, and she tugged it wider in order for James to crawl inside and to grasp onto the interior. Lindsey swooped in after him, followed by Asher, who was only working a few feet from the airlock anyway, and the door was shut behind him. They both turned the hatch. It sealed, and the systems to start pumping oxygen into the airlock started when James reached above him to tap at a luminescent screen. He stared as the percentage of oxygen rose.

In the meantime, he turned to face Lindsey, who was busy logging their entrance into another tablet fitted on the wall. They always had to state when they were exiting or entrancing the Hermes so that Houston could make sure that they weren’t cutting days short or… you know. Dying in space.

The oxygen levels gave a polite ding of 100%

“Oxygen levels stabilised. Welcome back, Lieutenant Washburn and Mission Specialist Wilson.” CEVA greeted from the speakers.

James fiddled with the base of his helmet for a while before he managed to unclasp it and pull it off. Asher did the same, offering James a small smile as he ran a hand over his face, shiny with sweat. They didn’t exactly have air conditioning in their suits.

But it was cold on the Hermes.

Lindsey had also taken her helmet off and was working on opening the second door, leading to the interior of the Hermes. The door clicked open and, with a light push, revealed the entrance ‘hall’ of the craft. James peeled his cap off – an ugly grey thing, similar to a swimmers cap – and discarded it to float through the air as he swept his hair back from his face. He would need to tie it up pretty soon, but for now he would have to deal with its annoying movements in zero-G.

Then he took off the headset, and was left sort of waddling into the craft.

It took about twenty minutes to shed the suit entirely, and then they were shoved into storage lockers for tomorrow’s shift. As soon as all the suits were firmly crammed into the limited space, they had a chance to catch their breaths.

“CEVA,” Lindsey began, pushing off of the locker. “What’s the time?”

“It is currently 3:58PM.”

“Okay. Could you call Brett to the living space?”

A faint buzzer sound echoed throughout the Hermes.

“Gravity stabilisation is gonna start pretty soon. Houston specifically requested we meet in the living room when it happens,” she explained, already beginning to push herself down the hall. “Hurry up, right?”

Asher sighed. “I’m gonna miss floating, man,” before he followed her.

James barked out a laugh as he shoved off a wall. “I won’t.”

They did meet in the living space with a minute to go. Although they hadn’t been given exact instructions on how to brace for such sudden stabilisation of gravity, they had slight suspicion that it was probably best to be sat down or lying down, according to Brett’s on-the-spot guesswork.

So that was what they did. They all buckled into their seats and waited patiently, in relative silence. James didn’t exactly know what to expect – would this make life in space harder or easier? Well, for one, he wouldn’t have to sleep vertically in his room. He would actually be able to sleep in his bed, and drink coffee properly, and not have to use a whole harness to use a treadmill. Maybe it would be okay.

“Gravity stabilising in T-minus 10,” CEVA began counting down in perfect one-Mississippi seconds.

She got to one.

It wasn’t dramatic. Nothing fell from the ceiling or dropped from gently floating through the air and nobody vomited, to everyone’s surprise. It was almost as if the air just shifted, and suddenly everything just felt heavier. Everyone’s hair suddenly fell flat against their heads. They all slumped into their seats. It sort of felt like James’ heart had dropped three feet. But that was it.

They all unbuckled their seatbelts one by one, and shakily stood. They could bear the sudden weight of gravity – exercise slots every day made sure of that. But it was odd to have two feet flat against the ground for the first time in well over half a year.

“You guys all alright?” Lindsey asked, slowly crossing the room to reach one of many communication points on the Hermes. After she received an assortment of affirmative mumbles from the rest of the crew, she slid a headset on and began to speak.

“Houston, this is the USS Hermes reporting  a successful gravitational stabilisation, over.”

No response. Not even static.

“Houston, come in. This is the USS Hermes, reporting a successful gravitation stabilisation, over.”

And then the lights went out. Not in a bulbs-smashing, aliens-attacking sort of way, but in a huge whirr that shook the spacecraft until the lights simultaneously shut off in a slight ani-climax. James startled.

“Oh… fuck,” he said shortly.

“Unmanned delivery pod docking successful. Welcome, Commanding Offic _eeee-e-e-e-“_ CEVA began, before being cut off by some of the most eerie distortion James had ever had the misfortune of hearing. But the crew seemed to hold their breath, and when nothing else happened, they sprang into action. James could barely see but with a squint he could make out Lindsey carefully crossing the room, illuminated on one side by the light of the Earth through the window.

“Okay, slight power mishap. Probably nothing to worry about?” she trailed off, looking between the other three before ducking down and delving into the cabinet of the communications point. She withdrew two bulky flashlights with stickers marked on them to state their being of only for emergencies and that they were, conveniently, battery powered. One was tossed to Brett, who almost dropped it when he didn’t immediately react to the lack of tendency for thrown things to, well, drift, at best. The other remained in her hands. “James and Brett, go restart the generator-“

“The one in the bridge?” Brett cut in, already heading for the door and gesturing for James to follow him.

“No,” Asher and Lindsey said at the same time.

“Go to the one in the, uh, storage room. The one in the bridge is a backup anyway. So… it won’t work.” Asher says, only slightly matter-of-factly.

“-And Asher and I are gonna try to re-establish contact with ground control,” She ducked down and fished out a plain black box, opening it quickly and dropping the lid on the ground. “Take one and stay in contact.”

She hands a small walkie-talkie to James.

James considers saluting – _that’s dumb_ – but just nods and follows after Brett, who was standing in the doorway of the room with the flashlight as an eerie beam on his features. He turns on his heel and begins to walk, boots slapping against the linoleum in the telltale fashion of someone who has not had to walk properly for a very long time. James jogged up to walk alongside him, and they stormed ahead in relative quiet until they turned a sharp corner and James, in a sort of built-up panic, exclaimed,

"Brett, I'm not feeling good about all this."

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m being serious.”

That made Brett stop in his step and look at James, properly, lowering his flashlight so the beam of light was bouncing off the floor and illuminating their faces from below. He had a soft look on his face for a second, something soft and concerned, before his eyebrows furrowed and his features hardened.

"What could possibly be wrong this time?” And, before James could answer, “The ship had a malfunction, that happens all the time.”

And then he continued to walk, leaving James to chase after him once more. They entered what they called the storage room, although it mainly consisted of boxes full of junk that ground control somehow supposed could be useful in extreme emergencies. James once had the misfortune of what they called the ‘boxing chore’ – looking through every single box and noting down what was in each one so that they could keep a record of what was there and what wasn’t. A body bag here, an inflatable pool float there. The essentials.

James almost slipped on that clipboard from where it lay on the ground, obviously having dropped from it’s free float since before the recent stabilisation. James kicked it away.

"Yeah, _I know_. But we've never had to reboot the generator in here - I haven't even been in _here_ , and it's  _creepy_ ," James argued with a frown. "And besides, this isn’t  just some, uh, random glitch. This was caused by the generator overheating or some shit. I haven’t even heard of that ever happening. And the fuckin’ AI-“

 

"The  _AI_  has a name," Brett interrupted, inputting a password on the dialpad to the left of the generator. James knew what it was – _160401_.

 

He begrudgingly adhered to Brett’s insistence on respecting a goddamn robot.

"... _CEVA_ has, like, completely stopped working. And she controls everything so, yeah, I’m a bit worried,"

Brett shrugged, swinging open the generator. It was a large metallic box positioned on the wall, about a metre high and wide. Inside was an incomprehensible mess of wires but, at the top left, was a single panel with a list of buttons and their corresponding functions. Brett scanned the list.

"-And it's not just that, okay? Did you hear CEVA report that pod? Another food delivery isn’t due for another two months.”

"That was a glitch.”

“Oh, right, because that’s-“

He was cut off by the sound of a box falling to the floor. It was a soft _whump_ noise, and both Brett and James turned their heads so hard they got whiplash. It came from further within the storage room, but too close for comfort. All the boxes were belted down to the shelf.

Someone was in there with them.

“Brett, are you armed?” James asked – a shot in the dark. Literally.

“Nope.”

“Just… hurry up, okay.”

James squinted at the rest of the room. He would never, ever, ever, admit it, but his hands were trembling. Bad.

It couldn’t be Lindsey or Asher – he could check, he remembered. He fumbled for his walkie-talkie, shoved into his hoodie pocket. He missed the button a few times, but managed to hold it down and speak.

“You guys there?” he whispered, eyes trained to a shadow in the corner. He squinted, palms sweaty and heart racing. It was just a stack of small boxes taped to the floor and wall.

There was a soft crackle on the line, long enough that Brett gave him an anxious glance before Asher’s voice came through.

“James?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s me. Listen, you and Lindsey are, uh, still up there, right?”

“Yeah – we’re in the control room,” then, as he seemed to note James’ shaky tone. “You two alright?”

Brett pulled a switch and the station lit up again.

“Hey, good job.” Asher reported and the line went dead.

“Okay," Brett mumbled as James scanned the room. There was nothing there, just rows and rows of boxes. So, he turned back around and inspected the generator. “I think that box must’ve just slipped from the belt, right? Happened a few months ago when I came down here to log the supplies.”

“Yeah, probably. Uh, sorry for freaking out.”

Brett waved him off.

James turned again, leaning against the wall and crossing his arms. He stared at the tiles beneath his feet as he picked up the walkie-talkie again.

“Hey, Asher. Everything is in the clear, so. We’ll be heading up now.”

“Cool.” Asher replied.

James lowered the radio and tapped his foot, slowly raising his head as Brett began to close the door and lock it with the dialpad, “You think that was-“

His eyes locked on the middle of the room.

"Hey, Brett?" He asked, voice faltering.

"One second - CEVA, you online yet?" The automated voice did not respond. Typical.

"Brett, seriously, man."

"Jesus Christ, what?" he turned, and stopped.

There, standing dead in the middle of the storage unit was one a man in a bulky orange spacesuit, worn out and old-fashioned, eyes narrowed and eyebrows raised, mouth parted in a soft ‘o’, fingers clutching a silver pouch of rations, which, James could see from there, was marked ‘JAMES R. WILSON’.

This was impossible. _He_ was impossible.

CEVA finally spoke up in her usual chipper voice.

"Foreign lifeform detected. Awaiting identification."

There was a horrible silence.

"Welcome, Commander Aleksandr Marchant of the SS Likhoradka. Status; deceased."


	2. nordo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter contains needle use and medication.

“It’s you.”

Those were the first words Aleksandr Marchant ever said to Missions Specialist James R. Wilson, who froze upon hearing them. For a moment, he wondered if he was talking to Brett, or even to Lindsey or Asher over the radio. But Commander Marchant was staring at him with wide, rabid eyes. And then he started walking. It reminded him of an old zombie film NASA sent up a few weeks ago, which James had watched in the late hours of the night due to sheer insomnia. Marchant shuffled across the floor. His knees looked shaky, like he hadn’t walked in years.

“…It’s me,” James responded dumbly. With a rigid hand he reached into his back pocket, gripped the radio and nudged it into Brett’s hand. No communication was needed – Brett held the radio behind his back and tapped the speaker. Morse code.

… --- …

Aleksandr was nearing and James found himself sort of backing up. He didn’t want to seem like an asshole, but this guy was definitely crazy and suffering from _some_ sort of space dementia or whatever Brett wanted to call it, and he _really_ didn’t like the look in his eyes. But he sped up, space suit heaving with every movement. And as he got closer, James could see the sheen of sweat on his forehead and the strands of bleached hair stuck to his face. He could see the beginning of a moustache on his features, scruffy but somewhat fitting. And, just above his hands, the beginning of aquamarine tattoos, mostly hidden by the clunky sleeves and supposed connection between where the glove should start.

And then Commander Marchant’s arms were around his shoulders and he was falling, falling, falling, and maybe he hadn’t got used to proper gravity because the fall totally winded him and then he was lying on the floor, out of breath and with a pounding headache, and with one commanding officer’s head close against the crook of his neck, taking rapid breaths and seeming like he may die any second. James felt like he had just been administered 10,000 volts of static electricity as a shock ran over his body, causing every muscle to seize up simultaneously. His hands trembled with the pain that wasn’t actually pain.

He blinked rapidly in some attempt to clear the headache and the shock. When his eyes finally focused, he could see Brett standing over him, eyes laced with concern as he clearly struggled for the correct approach, but then the sound of the door opening led to footsteps rapidly approaching them. And then Aleksandr was being lifted off his body. James could suddenly breathe again and the shock subsided, replaced with a dull tingling in his chest.

James sat up, slowly, and the world swam. Idly he wondered if Commander Marchant had drugged him or something because it felt like he was in zero-g again – the world was so floaty and light. He could feel Brett’s hands on his shoulders and could almost see his features right in front of him, but all he could focus on was the walking corpse a ways behind him, having been shoved into a wall by Asher and having the end of the needle shoved into his neck as he thrashed around, screaming incomprehensibly, seemingly having found his strength. He slowed down, however, when the needle was tugged out of his neck with a sickening noise and slowly began to slump until Asher was holding him up instead, and Lindsey was capping the needle calmly, turning to James with a frightened look on her blurry features.

And then he blacked out.

-

The world was really so small when you saw it from space. It was all peachy trying to put it into perspective down on the ground.

_“Did you know that that Alaska is bigger than Texas, California, and Montana combined?” His high school geography teacher, a tall woman with smudged lipstick on a wide smile. “Pretty huge, right?”_

But it was nothing like that in space. In space, you didn’t see Texas, Montana and California as neat little states with perfect borders, all individually coloured and labelled with a square of printer paper and a pin on a map. In space, all the countries just seemed to blur together. Was that Kansas or Nebraska? Poland or Ukraine? Thailand or Cambodia? James didn’t know. All he saw were patches of land embroidered with twinkling city lights when it got dark.

And then there was the vast ocean.

_“What ocean is this?” He asked his mom when he was ten on a family vacation to a country he couldn’t place the name of._

_She shrugged. “Atlantic?”_

_So Atlantic it was._

It was so, so blue. He could stare at it for hours. Once or twice they had watched hurricanes, huge swirling messes of cloud pass over land and, without speaking, they had all held their breath, waiting for NASA to tell them that their homes were flooded to the roof. News like that never came.

James was sort of relieved that the first thing he saw when he woke up was the Earth. It was almost glowing through the thick window that had been pressed up against his face. He had been placed in what they called ‘the dome’, which was actually called a cupola, and was lying on a window. It should have panicked him, lying on nothing but glass, but he woke up slowly and drowsily, and he just stared down in glum awe for a few minutes. When he felt his shoulders cramping up from the awkward position, he pushed himself up, using his hands to support his body. It hurt, but he managed to sit up on his knees and breathe evenly, hands braced against the metallic frame of the windows.

“Officer James Wilson has awoken and is displaying an abnormally slow heartrate, at 59BPM. Medical assistance is advised.” CEVA spoke.

James winced at the loud voice that just seemed to flood the room. So, they had fixed CEVA. And the lights were functioning. How did they fix them? He remembered walking (for the first time in months), and then being in the storage room, and then…

And then nothing.

The doors slid open. Lindsey walked in, unusually pale with deep bags beneath her eyes. James breathed in through his nose. Now that he thought of it, he didn’t feel great. He just felt kind of sluggish, like he had woken up from a three-day nap. How long had he been sleeping?

“Uh, you slept only about thirteen hours,” Lindsey answered. Had he spoken out loud? Probably not. Too cliché. “Sorry for the weird bed, by the way. We couldn’t really drag you all the way to sleeping quarters. Too far.”

James grunted softly and tilted his head to try to focus on what Lindsey was doing.

She was fiddling with a handheld sort of machine, hooked up to a _string? tube?_ He followed the trail until he was staring down at his own hand. A sticky patch was neatly pressed to the back of it, and he could see the faint outline of the beginning of a needle beneath it, and the slight bulge where it entered his skin. He slurred his words in an attempt to ask what it was, but it sounded more like a monotone note. He tried again. Same result. She seemed to understand.

“James, you’re on heavy sleeping medication to help with the pain. You wouldn’t stop screaming,” she flicked a dial and a cold rush shot through James. More medicine, he supposed. “You should be okay in a few hours. Want to move to your sleeping quarters?”

He nodded. With Lindsey’s hands on his shoulder, he grudgingly moved his legs so that he was nearly touching the floor. Then he dropped. It must have been about a foot drop. To him it felt like it had been thirty feet. But he dropped down  and immediately fell forwards, only held back by Lindsey, who grabbed the back of a shirt with a yelp.

He slowly managed to balance, and they sort of shuffled out of the room, Lindsey still holding the strange handheld device ahead of her as to not tangle the cord. They walked silently. The spacecraft felt so much bigger on foot – the hallway they walked down was about thirty metres, and then they entered the second hallway through a glass door, which was a further thirty metres, and then they made it to James’ previously unused sleeping quarter.

It was clean. There wasn’t exactly dust in space, so it looked brand new, but had obviously been tampered with. There were clean sheets and a thin blanket on the bed, along with a neat blue pillow. It reminded him of a hospital bed. He could see the sleeve of a black shirt poking out of the sliding door closet. Underneath the bed, neatly tucked away, was what they called an ‘emergency kit’. From what he could remember, it included an escape pod manual, a map of the spacecraft, a headset, a gas mask, and two dictionaries – English to Russian, and English to Mandarin. It was kept in a clear plastic box. He had a sort of foggy memory of sifting through it aimlessly.

“Here we are,” Lindsey said quietly, mainly to herself, as she sat James down on the bed. She stared at him for a moment with a sad look in her eyes before gesturing towards his hand. When he offered it to her, she carefully unstuck the small patch and ripped the needle out. James winced. It didn’t exactly hurt but it instilled a sort of new lightness in his right hand, one that was foreign. She threw the needle in the cabin’s bin with a slightly disgusted expression. “Uh, so no more pain meds as per Brett’s,” she put up air quotes here, “ _diagnosis._ ”

James wanted nothing more than to sleep, but he had to know something, anything.

When he opened his mouth, his tongue felt heavy and his words still unnatural, but he tried anyway.

“Where,” he stopped and started again. “Where is Marchant?”

The words were slurred, but Lindsey obviously understood by the way she froze up, eyes flicking to the floor and then back to James. Then she sort of nervously laughed, eyes averting.

“Asher put him in the, uh,” she seemed to struggle for the right word. “The brig. Or the storage facility, depending on how you wanna view it. We had to follow the duct tape protocol.”

James hummed out his best attempt at a laugh. The duct tape protocol was a weird joke brought up by Lindsey on the first day he met. He didn’t remember the origin, but he knew what it was. When an astronaut showed signs of psychosis or violence, the number one rule was to use duct tape to keep them detained. It was stupidly mundane.

“Why am I so sleepy?” He murmured, the words not even registering in his mind as he slowly moved to lie on his back. His eyelids felt so heavy and he wanted nothing more than for the lights to be hit and for everyone to just leave him alone for maybe the rest of the expedition.

Lindsey was still preoccupied with detaching the tube from the weird heartrate monitor/drug administrator hybrid she held. “You’ve been dosed up with pain meds, James. After Officer Marchant hit you-“

_He didn’t hit me._

_“_ You hit your head real bad. Then you started shaking, like convulsing, on the ground. We thought you were having some kind of seizure or somethin’. We don’t know what caused it-“

_He did._

“But you’re getting better. And as soon as we get back online with Houston, this whole mess will get cleaned up. Hopefully, anyway.” And then she wrinkled her nose and turned away, still speaking but the words were just one big static in James’ ears.

He turned his head away, and slept.

The first thing he registered upon waking up again was the pain that seemed to course through him. He lay there, in bed, sheets damp under his back and legs tangled in the blankets, taking hitched breaths and trying to will the pain away. Eventually it became a dull ache punctuated by stinging pangs in his head, like a nail was being drilled into his brain. He moved a hand (overestimating it’s heaviness and swiping a hand through the air abnormally fast, almost hitting himself in the face) and let it rest on his temple. The other hand braced against the mattress so that James could move into a sitting position with a series of pained grunts. Only when his legs were hanging off the side of the bed, socked feet neatly planted on the floor – _where are my shoes?_ – did he stand. His knees creaked and his spine gave a pang of pain, but he was up. His left hand was sprawled up on the wall, effectively keeping him upright.

He breathed through his nose in his best attempt at even, calm breaths, before he attempted to step. He almost slipped, but he made it, and before he knew it, he was at the door, pressing a miscalculated hand to the green button neatly marked ‘press to open’.

“Good evening Officer Wilson! The time in Houston is 11:36PM. Should I wake the Lieutenant?” CEVA asked, voice tinny through the cabin speaker.

“No, no,” James replied, voice heavy but at least it was understandable. “I’m gonna, uh,” he paused, losing his train of thought. For a moment he glanced around the cabin. “Probably just get on the treadmills, or somethin’.”

“No problem!” CEVA cheerily responded before the static died.

James stepped through the doorway and into the hallway, looking left, then right. Nothing.

He had no real intention of actually getting on the treadmills given his condition – that being that his whole body thrummed with raw pain – but he felt too wide awake to sleep any  more. Everything felt sharper somehow. So he walked down the hallway, trying not to acknowledge any pain, testing out that _mind over matter_ shit, but nothing could dull the sharp aches of every step. He didn’t really know where he was walking, but eventually he found himself at the entrance to the storage room.

Something at the back of his mind told him not to enter. Something Lindsey had said?

He thought hard, but all he could think of was Lindsey’s features washed out by bright lights, of her hands supporting him as they walked down seemingly endless halls.

But there was a nagging feeling in his chest. He had to go in.

He had to.

He pressed the button and the doors slid open.

All the lights in the storage room turned on at once, causing the steady hum of electricity to resonate through the space. James sniffed – it smelled metallic. Then his foot met something on the ground – something that crunched beneath him. He moved his foot. In a scattered mess of power was the remnants of some sort of food, unidentifiable if it weren’t for the silver package a ways away.

His name was neatly marked on the label in printed capitals, followed by the words ‘PREPARED MEAL – BROWNIES’

Shit. He had been saving that for a special occasion. Grudgingly, he shook his foot to get any excess crumbs off, trying his best to ignore the shooting pain up his leg that followed. When he planted his foot on the ground again, he carefully avoided the rest of the crumbs.

The storage room felt so much smaller when you were actually standing in it. The shelves of boxes seemed to crowd in on him like he was in the world’s smallest alleyway, almost suffocating him. The light above him flickered. With a heave, James trudged onwards to a destination he wasn’t sure of.

Up ahead, he could see the generator, still open. He took a few wary steps towards it and when he reached the box, he stopped and nudged open the door slightly further, peering at the inner workings. He couldn’t begin to understand it. That was more Brett’s thing. Nonetheless, he picked up the manual stored in an inner pocket on the door and flicked through it mindlessly, only pausing to peer at odd black-and-white pictures he was almost certain were ripped directly from WikiHow.

Then something grunted.

It sounded like an animal – that was his first thought. Like a dog, but a really big dog. Maybe a horse? He didn’t think horses grunted. What would a horse be doing on a space station? That didn’t make sense.

James slowly placed the manual back in the pocket and closed the generator. He briefly considered turning and running away, getting the hell out and going back to his cabin. He had to be dreaming, or something. That grunt wasn’t human, it was an animal. Or something. Shit, nothing made sense anymore.

Another grunt, more pained now.

James blinked. It was coming from his left, but when he turned to look, there was a huge shelf blocking his view. He didn’t want to know. But he had to. That stupid, irrational part of his brain whispered _what if it’s Ein? What if she’s hurt?_ James couldn’t quite picture Ein properly, but he remembered soft fur and excited barking. He remembered the scuttering of claws of hardwood and the funny smell of dog food. What if it _was_ Ein?

He took a first step towards the opening between two shelves, heart racing and seemingly in his throat. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears. Then he took another step, and then another, and then he was at the opening. He could see the thing from the corner of his eyes. He didn’t dare look.

But he did.

It was a man – it may have well been a wounded animal, though. The guy was whimpering fiercely, body racking with shakes. He was restrained in an office chair, hands and feet taped to the furniture with a copious amount of Duct tape and mostly silencing him with the strip on his mouth. James gaped for a moment. The man wasn’t fully conscious, but he was obviously an astronaut of some sort. The orange spacesuit was a dead giveaway.

James took one step forward. His back hit the shelf, and it jostled dangerously. He spun to place two hands on it, to steady it, and nothing fell, thank god, but when he turned around, he was met with a pair of dangerous eyes.

They were brown.

The man was staring at him, with no semblance of emotion on his face. There was no strain on his face even as his knees and shoulders jumped erratically like he was receiving a constant electric shock, and his arched eyebrows remained perfectly neutral. James stared back like he was looking death in the face. The guy made another noise – not quite a grunt, not quite a whimper – a sort of begging noise. He didn’t know what made him do it, but James stepped forwards, hands outstretched. The guy watched him. His eyes became more wary now. He looked familiar (at least his eyes did), but it wasn’t placeable.

Another step.

He was close to him now, within arm’s reach. He wanted to free this guy. It felt wrong that he should be free and he not. But what had this guy done to get locked up like this? He reached out.

The man watched his hand and jumped when James’ knuckle made contact with his cheek. James startled too – the man’s skin was eerily cold, and a dull tingle ran up and down his arm at the contact. But he prevailed and placed his other hand on the arm of the chair, centimetres away from the man’s hand. He felt compelled to touch it for some odd reason, like it was magnetic. He resisted and focused on the task at hand. With his dominant hand he began to nudge away the corner of the duct tape, fixatedly avoiding eye contact with the guy who was staring him down with huge eyes that were seemingly locked to his face. James gripped the corner of the tape and began to pull, watching as it peeled off quickly reddening skin. The man didn’t wince and kept up his ogling act. He was tugging it off the corner of his mouth, so close to hearing this guy explain himself, and

A warm hand grabbed his upper arm and pulled him away. The world moved in slow motion as James moved through the air, and then everything seemed to shift into focus when his back met the wall with a hard slam.

He was winded for a moment, taking deep breaths like he had just woken from a bad dream, like ones where he was running and tripped, or when he fell off a ledge. In front of him and still with a tight grip on his arm was Brett, who was frowning at him. He could hear panicked but muffled screaming a few feet to his left.

“James, James, look at me,” James blinked. Everything was sort of blurry. “James.”

He finally managed to look at Brett, who was surveying him with a sort of concern.

“You were sleepwalking,” he seemed to conclude.

“Huh?” James responded sleepily. He didn’t sleepwalk.

“You were sleepwalking, James.” Brett repeated patiently, loosening his grip and patting his shoulder in some odd attempt at comfort. Then he calmly looked to his left.

James followed his gaze. There was Officer Marchant, taped to a desk chair with a surprising amount of Duct tape. The strip on his mouth was almost off, and he could him subtly trying to shift his mouth enough to pry it off. He remembered now, fuzzily. He had tried to take it off. Why would he do that? He had hurt him. Speaking of which, James flexed his hand experimentally. The pain had ceased entirely.

It was like he was finally alert.

He looked over to Brett, who was now knelt before Marchant, staring him dead in the eye. He had stopped trying to work the duct tape gag off and was sitting relatively calmly, staring right back at Brett. Then he moved his head to look at James.

An involuntary chill ran over James and he turned away to pretend to be interested in the side of a box.

“CEVA, what time is it?” He asked with a thin voice, feeling eyes bearing into his back.

“It is currently 6:03AM in Houston. Work begins in two hours and fifty-seven minutes.”

Shit. He had lost time.

“Except it doesn’t.” Brett said calmly, and when James turned to look, he was working on unwrapping the duct tape off the left arm of the Officer. “Contact with NASA is still just not happening, so we’re takin’ a day off to figure out what to do about all this.”

Made sense.

James nodded and considered helping Brett out with the other arm but the Officer was looking at him funny. He elected not to, and was saved by the bell.

“James and Brett, could you get to the living quarters?” Lindsey asked over the speakers. She sounded exhausted,

“Working on it.” Brett replied, giving up on the duct tape and instead standing and beginning to push the chair through the room. It would almost be funny in any other situation. “Guess we’ll just have to unwrap you once we get there, bud.”

There was a weak noise of protest from the Commanding Officer. James trailed behind them as they journeyed to the living quarters through a series of sterile white hallways. The scene must’ve looked ridiculous, proven only by Asher’s snort as they entered the living space. He was sprawled out on an armchair, in a pair of sweatpants and a plain white shirt. Lindsey was also in some sort of sleepwear, in slightly baggy leggings and a hoodie, neatly displaying MIT on the front. Lindsey had graduated a few years earlier than James, but he had the exact same hoodie. She was on the other armchair, knees up to her chest as she anxiously tapped her fingers on the arm.

She stood when they entered, and smiled only a little at the mess of the trio.

“You alright, James?” She asked, but didn’t really wait for a response before her gaze shifted to their – he didn’t _want_ to say prisoner, but it seemed the most fitting – prisoner. Her expression hardened. “Should we maybe get that tape off his face?”

Brett shrugged, and stepped around the chair to squat before Officer Marchant. He muttered a ‘sorry, man’ and promptly ripped the tape off. Aleksandr, who had been gawking at the view of the Earth outside the window with childlike wonder, was obviously not expecting the attack.

Aleksandr gasped, tilted his head back with his eyes squeezed closed, and groaned.

When he opened his eyes again, it was met with three sets of eyes staring at him curiously.

“You’re not gonna attack James this time?” Asher dryly asked.

Marchant scoffed. “No.”

James felt suddenly exposed when his eyes moved over to look at him again in a focused stare, only broken was Lindsey stepped between them protectively.

“You’re Commanding Officer Aleksandr Marchant, right?” she asked it like there was any doubt.

“Yeah.” He responded. James wondered if he exclusively spoke in one-word sentences.

“Okay,” Lindsey said shortly, as if she wasn’t really sure how to approach the situation. “I guess we’re gonna let you go now,” she nodded at Brett. “But try anything, and I will shoot you. James, a word?”

James was a little hung up on the _shooting_ bit, but eventually the request registered in his head and he followed Lindsey to the corner of the room, where she fixed him with a stern look.

“James, what’s this about?”

“What’s… what about?”

“You and Officer Marchant. Do you two know eachother?”

“ _Do we know eachother –_ he died in, like, 1998 – how would we know eachother?” He replied, maybe a bit too defensively, because Lindsey scowled.

“I don’t know, but this whole situation is weird, and he’s latching onto _you._ ” She snapped. And then she seemed to soften a little. “Listen, we need to figure this out and I – I really need you to help.”

“…Okay.”

She gave him a stiff nod and turned to begin walking back to the group, followed shortly by James.

Officer Marchant was getting his left wrist unwrapped, wincing at the pain of the tape being pulled from his arm. He seemed to straighten up when he saw James had returned. When Brett tugged the last part of tape off, he was free to stand, and with Asher’s careful hand on his elbow, he did. He wasn’t as shaky now, but he still seemed unsure about walking properly.

“Uh, James, mind lending Officer Marchant some of your clothes?” Lindsey asked, eyes averted as if she was seeing something she wasn’t supposed to be. He supposed it must be strange for her – an astronaut everyone honoured suddenly in front of her – they even had a remembrance day for him at NASA every September 1st.

He wrinkled his nose at the thought of sharing _his_ clothes, and almost opened his mouth to argue, but he needed to help. So, begrudgingly, he nodded and waved a hand at Aleksandr to follow him.

He exited the room without a glance back, the only indication of actually being followed coming from the soft tapping of feet a ways behind him. They were halfway through the first hallway, door long closed behind them when the tapping became more rapid, and James was starting to look behind him with concern before he was slammed into the wall for the second time that day.

It was Aleksandr, obviously. He had shoved him against the wall, keeping his there with the side of his right forearm pressed against James’ throat, the other hand gripping James’ wrist. His hips pressed against James’, practically pressed against him and leaving James to gasp for air, free hand grasping weakly at the arm crushing his windpipe.

He could see Aleksandr’ face inches from his own, eyes wild and face curled in what could be a snarl, only amplified by the mess of his hair and the soft pink of the remnants of duct tape.

“What the _fuck_ , man,” James choked out, desperately gripping Aleksandr’s arm in terror. He was going to fucking die here, with his crew only a few feet away, oblivious, to the hands of a crazy person.

“No, shut the fuck up, James,” He hissed, pressing his arm further into James’ neck. “You need to fuckin’ tell me what you’re doing here, okay?”

James frowned, desperately kicking out against Aleksandr. “What do you mean?”

“I mean – you don’t belong here, and you know it,” he pushed, eyes narrowing.

“What?”

“Don’t make me _fucking_ repeat myself, you-“

And then he fell. For a moment, James couldn’t compute what had made him fall, all he could focus on was actually being able to fully breathe again. Then Lindsey came into his view, cradling the knuckles on her right hand with her other. “You alright?” she asked, quietly.

“Yeah, yeah.” He breathed. “Yeah.”

“Okay,” she said quietly, and turned to the officer, who was groaning on the floor. She squatted down next to him, nudging his shoulder to roll him onto his back. He winced at the movement. James could see the start of a trickle of blood from his nose.

“Officer Marchant, can you hear me?”

A groan.

“Listen, you need to snap out of this, right? This isn’t you.”

James had no idea how she could be sure, but Aleksandr whimpered when he nodded in agreement, and that seemed convincing enough to Lindsey, who tapped his shoulder before standing again.

“Get up,” she said. Aleksandr did.

He braced a hand against the wall for balance and used the other to wipe away the blood slowly streaming from his nose and down his chin. His eyes were fixed to James.

“I’m, uh, sorry, man.” It sounded sort of genuine, so James nodded, but the resentment was hot in his chest.

Lindsey elected to leave them with the promise that she was watching through the security cameras on board the ship, and they continued, this time walking side-by-side. It was quiet until they reached James’ cabin. The door slid open with a whoosh, and they stepped in, Aleksandr going first. James was fully aware that there were no cameras in the cabin, and he was certain the officer knew that, but they said nothing about it.

Aleksandr stood uncomfortably in the middle of the room whilst James sifted through his closet, eventually throwing him a plain black shirt and some grey sweatpants, making sure they were clothes he didn’t really care about. When he turned back, the man was clutching the clothes like his life depended on it, eyes like saucers and looking sort of wet. Blood was smudged on his upper lip.

“You don’t know me,” he said softly.

“I mean, I kind of do. They made us study you at, uh, the academy,” he shrugged, and tentatively continued. “After you, you know. I mean. Sorry.”

He wasn’t really sure how to tell him he died. How did you tell someone that? He decided to try to avoid it.

“I died.”

Well.

“…Yeah.”

Aleksandr huffed, like he was surprised.

They stood there in silence for a while, hearing the craft creak around them. He could hear the oxygen rushing through the vents.

“That’s new.”

Kind of a weird statement, but it seemed to be a cue for James to leave. He approached the door and pressed the button. As the door slid open, he inclined his head to look at Aleksandr, who was already reaching to get out of the suit.

“Hey, we, uh eat breakfast together. You should come.”

He nodded without a word.

James left, the door giving an all-too-unfinished _woosh_ behind him.

The hallways felt longer than ever when he trudged down them, but he finally reached the kitchen, which was nice enough, he guessed. Complete with a weird sort of hybrid between a breakfast bar and a dining table, too, with four too many seats. Lindsey and Brett were already seated, but not eating, and speaking in hushed voices. They halted entirely when James entered.

“Where’s Asher?” He asked, not really concerned, but looking for a way to avoid the conversation that was destined to happen.

“Getting dressed,” Brett answered. He seemed to debate the situation with himself before speaking again. “James, do you want us to - I don’t know. Separate you and Officer Marchant?”

James blinked and suddenly felt like he was elementary school again, talking to his teacher after another kid threw a pebble at him. “What? No. I  mean, he’s obviously fucking crazy, but-“

“Do you feel safe?”

James stopped, and thought. He didn’t have time to reply, though, because then Aleksandr was wandering in, looking only slightly lost. He was wearing James’ clothes, and they looked so natural it unsettled him. He took wary steps towards the bar and sat a seat away from James, quiet. They were all quiet, until Lindsey, thankfully, said something. 

“So, Officer Marchant-“

“Aleks.”

She startled. “What?”

“Uh, yeah, I prefer Aleks.”

“…Okay. Well, obviously we don’t have any rations on board for you, so we’re all gonna cut down our own to effectively make yours.”

James gaped. He _never_ agreed to this.

“Uh, that’s fine. You don’t have to do that.”

Lindsey frowned. “You have to eat.”

He stayed quiet at that. James found himself drawn to the shock of platinum blonde hair atop his head, still messy and overgrown, dark roots coming through clearly.

“What happened to your hair, dude?” He said, and everyone at the table turned to look at him, including Asher, who was just now walking in and taking the seat opposite Aleks.

Aleks hunched his shoulders. “What?”

“Your hair, it’s, like, blonde.”

“Yeah…”

“I think James means to say is that when your craft launched, it wasn’t blonde. It was natural, like brown.”

Aleks shrugged, eyes fixed to the table top. He obviously didn’t really have any explanation. Brett looked at him for a moment, before standing and moving around to the kitchen.

“CEVA, could you get me five water guns?”

“Coming right up!”

The water guns were more like syringes of cold water that they injected into the freeze dried food they got delivered up there. They were more useful in zero-g, but were still utilised for eating. The guns clacked down one by one into a compartment that Brett tugged open to retrieve, sort of like a vending machine. Then he reached into a cupboard and unclipped the seatbelt holding down the six bowls there, setting five out on the counter. James observed Aleks, twisted around in his seat, watching the preparation intently.

“Okay, so, we’re trying to regain communication with NASA, but Asher suspects it could be – what was it?”

“An issue with the satellite.”

“I thought this whole station was a satellite.”  James monotoned.

Asher seemed to find this funny. “Yeah, but the one keeping us connected to Houston might need rebooting.”

“So, we’ll do the spacewalk sometime tomorrow and figure it out. Aleks, you know anything about satellites?”

“What?” Aleks asked abruptly, turning back. “Uh, yeah. A bit.”

“Think you’d be able to help out?”

He nodded mutely. Brett brought over the first two plates, followed by the remaining three, one balanced precariously on his forearm. James looked down at the food, at the neat little cubes of rehydrated cereal staring back at him. No milk, of course. Begrudgingly, he picked up one and popped it into his mouth, chewing dully. The crew did the same, Aleks eating much faster. James figured he was probably hungry (even though he did steal James’ brownies only a few hours ago. Dick.)

They finished breakfast in silence, stacking the plates neatly in the centre. Asher took them to the sink (which didn’t even have a faucet really. It had a huge lid that closed, and steam was forced into it, which cleaned the plates. At least, that was James’ understanding.) and placed them inside, unstacked.

Lindsey tapped her fingertips on the table top restlessly.

“Okay, so no jobs today. Our main priority right now is getting back in contact with NASA.”

“Will you tell them about me?” Aleks asked with an unusually soft voice.

Lindsey paused. “Yeah.”

“Don’t.” He said, too firm to be friendly. Lindsey seemed to bristle.

“And why not?”

“If they find out about me, you guys will be brought down and I’ll be killed. They couldn’t handle a – what’s the word? – like, a drama about me,” he paused, before adding, “a scandal.”

Lindsey frowned. “We can’t hide you.”

Aleks exhaled through his noise, exasperated. “Fine, do whatever. I don’t care, man.”

He huffed, pushed back his stool, and left the room. They watched him leave.

“You’re not actually going to tell NASA, are you?” Brett asked.

“Of course not,” Lindsey responded. “But we really need to figure out what happened.”

James gazed out of the window and stared right back at the accusatory face of Earth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can find me @powellio on tumblr!


	3. mayday

“It is currently eleven-twenty-two PM in Houston. Protocol states you should all be asleep by now,” CEVA chimes, and James doesn’t miss the bemused tone in her electronically toned voice.

But it was too late to sleep – they had just almost had a breakthrough with getting through to NASA. While Asher had been fiddling with wires beneath the communications panel, legs poking out almost comically, Lindsey had been reading through a thick white manual and flicking buttons at the random. Brett was adamantly disagreeing with everything said manual was describing. James had elected himself as ‘supervisor’, seeing as he had no real idea how to fix anything except the Hubble. So he stood, shone the flashlight where they asked, and kept an eye on Aleks, who had fallen asleep mid-conversation on the couch. Amidst James’ continuous eye rolling and scoff, Brett had placed a thin blanket over him.

It was between Asher accidentally cutting a wire in half and Lindsey guffawing at one of Brett’s many criticisms that a steady static came through the speakers. They all froze. Even Aleks seemed to still from his incessant tossing and turning. The static stayed for about ten seconds, before being interrupted by a voice – unintelligible – and a few notes of a song, eerily familiar to James. It sounded old.

Then the speaker crackled and silence remained.

“Okay, well,” and Lindsey seemed to take an exasperated breath. “Okay. Lets just… get some sleep. We’ll figure this out tomorrow. Probably.”

They all seemed to sigh in relief.

Brett left first, reaching into the kitchen drawer and retrieving a ration of chocolate – which James knew was only about three squares – and departing to his cabin. Lindsey left second, mumbling something about being exhausted as she shut the communications panel’s door and left through the same door as Brett.

Asher approached James before leaving.

“Hey,” he looked off to Aleks. “What do you think?”

James sniffed. “Of what?”

“Of Aleks, dude.”

Now was James’ turn to look at the man curled up on the couch like a child, hair splayed against the blue cloth and legs tangled in the blanket. “I don’t know.”

Asher inclined his head with a small smile. “Okay, man.”

His tone was neutral, but James felt only slightly undermined. Like Asher knew something he didn’t.

“See you tomorrow,” he quietly said. Asher left.

Then it was just James and Aleks.

James stood around for a moment, unsure how to approach the situation. Aleks looked like he was sleeping heavily enough that it would be difficult to wake him and get him somewhere to sleep, but he couldn’t just let the guy who, for all he knew, had been through Hell to get here, sleep on a goddamn couch. So it was with tentative steps that James moved to crouch down beside the couch and place a careful hand on his shoulder. He began to shake gently.

“Wha-at?” Aleks croaked sleepily.

James slowly withdrew his hand. There was something way too intimate about this.

“Hey, uh,” he cleared his throat. “Do you wanna sleep with me?”

Aleks opened one eye, brown iris peeking out from under his eyelid. “What?” he asked again, voice cracking slightly.

“Uh,” then what he said seemed to register in his head. “No, no, man. No. Jesus. Just – do you wanna like, sleep on my floor?”

The offer was lame, but the rapid explanation James gave startled a laugh out of Aleks. James jumped at the sound but found himself relaxing quickly enough, and exhaled through his nose in some sort of laugh. This was so embarrassing.

Aleks sat up slowly, blanket falling down around his hips. He swung his legs over the couch and stood up exhaustedly, adjusting his – no, James’- shirt. James straightened up too, moving his hands to fiddle with his hair, twirling the strands of hair loosely falling out of the bun he had done in a rush between Asher asking him to hold a wire and Brett passing him a notepad and asking him to note down what he was saying. He guessed it was a nervous tic of sorts.

Aleks rubbed at his eye, shrugged, and started to move. It seemed like he had gotten his bearings pretty fast – it took James about a week to be able to get around the Hermes without constantly asking CEVA which way to go. James was left to pace after him, slipping through the already sliding doors and managing to catch up, walking alongside Aleks.

He sneaked a glance to his right. Aleks looked tired, and not in a you-just-woke-me-up way. In a way James couldn’t begin to describe, like he had seen things. Bad things. Aleks caught his glance eerily fast and met it with a sharp frown, only softened by the hair flopping over his eyes in greasy strands. James quickly averted his eyes, sensing a sort of discomfort over the situation. But the hallway was narrow, and they were practically walking shoulder to shoulder, so much so that when they reached James’ cabin, it took a moment of uncomfortably closeness and fumbling for James to reach the button to open the door. James stepped inside first and made a beeline for the storage compartments above his bed, attached to the wall. They contained one plain pillow and a thin blanket, as a spare.

He turned to see Aleks with his arms outstretched, and the heap of material was unloaded onto him, which was then thrown onto the floor unceremoniously. James looked at the cold floor for  a moment and considered offering up his bed for the night. But he couldn’t do that. He barely trusted this guy enough to let him stay in the same room.

Aleks was sitting on the floor now, adjusting the pillow quietly. James took a seat on his bed.

“CEVA, set an alarm for, uh. Maybe around eight in the morning?” he mumbled, but the blue light above his head blinked, indicating understanding. It wasn’t exactly surprising – CEVA had been programmed to be the optimum AI. James was pretty sure she could do anything. Not in a cool way, though, in a creepy way.

“No problem, Officer Wilson! Alarm set for eight AM.”

James gripped the blanket and began to fold it over himself. He felt gross – wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing all day and not even taking the time to brush his teeth or anything, but exhaustion had totally overtaken him. Aleks was lying down now, back to him but breaths rising and falling way too erratically to be asleep just yet.

So they lay there, in quiet, in the dark, for about ten minutes before Aleks spoke.

“What do you do?”

James, in the liminal space between awake and asleep, hardly processed the question before Aleks followed it up by sitting up suddenly. James startled at the movement and opened his eyes, jolting back and hitting the back of his head on the wall the bed was pushed up against, marked with an “Ah, shit,” whilst feeling at the back of his head with a short glare directed towards Aleks.

Aleks didn’t say anything.

“What’d you say?” James asked with a slight wince, eventually concluding that he wasn’t bleeding and instead leaning against the wall.

“What do you do? Like, job-wise.” He repeated.

James looked at Aleks for a moment. He was sitting up from his makeshift bed, blanket pooling in his lap and socked feet poking out from beneath it. The pillow was against his lower back, probably dragged with him when he sat up. His hair was a mess. The blue light in the cabin seemed to bounce off him like a mirror – it followed the cut of his cheekbone on his face, the curve of his shoulder, the habitual twitching of his left pinkie.  But it didn’t follow the _dark_ in his eyes.

The _dark_ was what James had started to call it in his head, almost without even realising. He didn’t exactly know what the _dark_ was, but he knew it was something to do with the intense nothingness in Aleks’ eyes, masked behind a thin and cracking layer of false knowledge, hope, _anything_ that made him remotely… human. It scared him.

Aleks was staring at him now. James struggled to remember the question for a second, and he stammered over an answer. The _dark_ stared back at him, expectantly.

“Ah,” he started, voice emerging embarrassingly weak. “I’m a – I’m a mission specialist.”

Aleks was quick. “Specialising in what?”

James shifted uncomfortably. “I’m upgrading the, uh, Hubble,” he shook his head, trying to clear the sudden fog. “It broke.”

Aleks nodded solemnly. “How long has it been broken?”

“Shit, I don’t know, man. What’s with all the questions?”

“Answer it.” Aleks firmly responded.

“Fuckin’… eight months, maybe.”

“Your training?” Aleks had leant closer now, hands propped up against the side of the bed and on his knees, staring at James with cold eyes. James felt paralysed.

“Six months.”

Aleks exhaled through his nose in some short imitation of a laugh at that, and then he was suddenly sitting on James’ mattress. In defence, James drew up his knees. He was dully conscious of his hands shaking. He realised he was terrified of this man.

“What university?”

“MIT,” James averted his eyes.

Aleks rolled his eyes, pushed his body back, and then he was shoulder-to-shoulder with James, backs pressed against the cold wall. James could feel the presence of Aleks’ hand a few centimetres from his own, could feel his warm breath against his shoulder. “Typical,” he muttered.

James frowned. “Well, okay, asshole. Where did you study?”

“The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology,” Aleks responded quickly, mid-way through following it with a “so there”, before he stopped and fell silent, eyes wide in comical surprise. His whole body was rigid. James hesitated before leaning forwards and placing a hand on his shoulder against his own will. He felt a dull shock in his hand but he prevailed, watching Aleks, who was breathing unevenly and rapidly. James shook his shoulder gently.

“Are you okay?”

No response.

“Aleksandr?”

Aleks stilled again, shoulder tensing against James’ palm.

And then he warped – that likely wasn’t the right word, but there was no way James could acutely describe what he saw. Aleks’ whole body just seemed to glitch – to flicker, really – into nothingness.

James’ hand fell through thin air with a soft _woosh_. He stopped himself from falling forwards and instead jolted back, back hitting the wall again as he stared at the space where Aleks had once been, at the creases in the sheet where he had been sitting, at his unmade bed on the floor.

Aleks was gone.

And then the was a ringing in his ears and Aleks had reappeared, face inches from James and eyes widened in the same surprise. His hands were splayed on either side of James’ head and body positioned in between his legs, and James would be embarrassed if not for what had just occurred. Aleks heaved a breath, eyes glassy and not quite focusing on anything, pupils making erratic movements from side to side. James didn’t know why he did it, but his hand seemed to move on it’s own and placed itself on Alek’s waist, just where his body was nearly doubled over from his kneel – where his stomach creased and heaved with shuddering breaths, one after another. His hand rested there. It wasn’t uncomfortable. Aleks finally seemed to look down at him, hair falling in locks over his eyebrows and a thin sheen of sweat over his forehead before he promptly slumped. His head fell in the crevice between James’ shoulder and neck, hands limp at his side.

“We need to fucking get out of here, James.” He mumbled through hitched breaths, and James barely registered what had just happened before he closed his eyes, and slept, seemingly without meaning or even wanting to. All he knew was that Aleks was right. He did need to get out of there.

-

He woke, and he was alone.

A sweeping orchestral score was echoing through the room, soon enough accompanied by the warbling tones of Judy Garland. It was ‘ _Somewhere over the Rainbow’_. He felt a strange sense of out-of-body nostalgia.

_“I hate this film,” a six year old James said, bundled up in a mess of blankets in front of a bulky television._

_“Yeah, me too,” His mom fondly mumbled, already reaching for the TV remote._

He dimly wondered if last night had been some awful nightmare, but Aleks’ bed was in the same disarray, and James had woken up with his back against the wall. He considered how long Aleks had stayed with him as he moved to get up, grunting at the grotesque crack his back gave him in protest.  He gulped a breath of air and shifted his hands to prop against the mattress and push himself to his feet. He landed on the floor with a soft _thump_ , and crossed the room, stepping over the bundle of blankets on the floor to reach the door, which slid open with a hiss to no prompt. Strange. Nevertheless, he stepped through to the hallway and then - he wasn’t in the hallway.

He was in a small square room, masked in a neon red light. He turned to backtrack, to get back to his cabin, because this room give him a distinct feeling of repulsion laced with terror, but the door was gone, replaced with a glass window leading to a larger room. He was in an observation room. He blinked a few times. The room beyond the window was dark, and it didn’t help that the room he was in was so bright that every light seemed to bounce off the surface, including his own reflection. He looked different, in more ways than one. He looked frailer and paler, and his hair was cropped short now. He was wearing an ugly off-white jumpsuit, tied at the waist and far too long in the legs, so much so that they had been cuffed over the mismatching sneakers.

Tentatively, he looked around the room. It was definitely a control room of some sort, lined with panels with blinking buttons and switches. A set of nine clunky monitors, arranged atop each other in a perfect square flickered in their displays of wobbly lime green waves.

James stepped towards the window. He didn’t want to, by any means. He knew that stepping forwards and pressing his face up against the  dark window could only have bad consequences, but he did it anyway, like he was the extra in a shitty horror movie who dies before the opening credits. He neared the glass and placed a splayed hand on the surface. It was cold. He stared at his own reflection again, took in the finer details – the bruised cheekbone, the split lip, the messy beard. He looked ill, like  on-the-verge-of-death ill. He frowned, and the reflection followed suit.

And then the reflection flickered, and was replaced by Aleks.

He was dressed in the same bland jumpsuit, but it was unbuttoned, revealing the beginning of a plain white undershirt. The sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and James could really see those luminescent tattoos, wrapping up and down his forearms like silk. His hair was still blonde, but it looked the opposite to James’ – it was overgrown, flopped onto his forehead in some sort of fringe, brown roots overrun and flowing into the blonde. His left eye was bruised, and there was a series of three or four small cuts on his jawline. He regarded James with a dull look, cold and isolating, and James turned away quickly, mostly out of discomfort, to look at the monitors again. He could see the head of blonde out of the corner of his eye.

The monitors flashed a red for a moment.

“Number 03,” an automated voice announced.

James started.

“That’s me,” he mumbled, and stepped forward to press a hand against the monitor.

“James,” the machine deadpanned, and James stopped, hand dropping. That voice. That was CEVA.

“ _Why, oh why, can’t I?”_ The song finished with a dreamy fade-out, and James was left with the machine.

“James,” it repeated.

“What?” James hissed, and then Aleks banged on the glass, and he turned to see him screaming, tears streaming down his features, but it was like he was yelling underwater, and James yelled back, “what?”, but no noise came out.

“James. James. James. James,” CEVA continued, voice cutting through the air like a bullet.

Aleks kept hitting the glass.

It shattered.

James James James James James James James James James James James James James James

“James!”

James startled awake, breaths heaving, and saw Aleks. He was sitting opposite him, on his knees between James’ legs, leaning over him. One of his hands were on James’ knee, the other on his shoulder, shaking gently. He sat back when he looked alert enough.

“You alright, man?” He asked, worry evident in his tone.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m-“ He paused. “I’m fine,”

Aleks nodded, and moved to stand. He was already rummaging through James’ wardrobe when he asked, “Can I borrow some more clothes?”, and, when James’ affirmative grunt came, proceeded to slip off his shirt and replace it with a black one that James hardly ever wore. James subconsciously looked away and sat up, rubbing at his eyes.

“Bad dream, huh?” Aleks asked, although it sounded like more of a statement than anything.

“Yeah. Fucking weird, too.”

He suddenly remembered last night – Aleks flickering and reappearing. His throat clenched with fear – but Aleks seemed as solid as ever. Dimly, he wondered if he could pass it off as some kind of weird nightmare or hallucination. But he wouldn’t be able to forget how his hand passed through the air, how Aleks stared at him with just pure terror before phasing away.

“About last night-“ he began, but Aleks turned with a snort.

“Yeah, I kind of fell asleep on you. I know. Sorry, dude.”

James huffed out a laugh, but it wasn’t funny.

“No, I mean,” but Aleks just looked at him with a puzzled look. Maybe he _was_ just dreaming. Anyway, the last thing he wanted was for Aleks to say something around Lindsey or, Jesus, Brett, who would immediately place him in his weirdass series of psychiatric evaluations. No, he couldn’t deal with that. It would just prolong the Hubble mission. “Nothing.”

Aleks smiled.

They made their way to the living quarters a moment after that, and met up with Asher, who was sitting at the kitchen table, chewing on a brownie cube – James should really bring that up with Aleks – and reading through another manual, making notes on it with a blue pen. He looked up when they entered, glanced between them with a grin.

“Morning,” he greeted.

James frowned. “Hi,” and then made a beeline for the kitchen to get some sort of food. He was starving, so much so that he felt queasy. Aleks sat opposite Asher quietly.

James reached up to grab two plates from the cupboard and fished in the lower drawers for something. He eventually settled for the bag marked ‘Pineapple Fruitcake’ and tipped it out onto one plate. Then, he split it into two halves and placed them on the two separate plate. It wasn’t huge, but they had to distribute food now. He brought them back to the table and placed one in front of Aleks, who looked down at the food. He picked it up tentatively and let part of it crumble onto the plate before biting into it. When it seemed like he had decided it was mostly edible, he continued eating without complaint.

“Hey, Aleks, you know how to reboot a satellite?”

Aleks startled and nearly choked on his bite. It took a few seconds of coughing for him to get his voice back. “A - a satellite?”

“Uh-huh. We think rebooting it will get us back in contact with NASA. You ever done it?” Asher didn’t even look up, continuing to mark the paper with miniscule notes in shorthand writing. James bit into his cake, grimacing at the ever-so-slight blandness of it. It seemed all their food tasted like that, though.

“Yeah, sure,” Aleks responded easily, but James guessed that tone was at least partially feigned. “I mean, back on the Likhardoka, we had an issue with, you know, ground contact once. I think, uh, Anna solved it in the end.”

“Anna Marie?”

Aleks nodded. “I think that’s what she changed her name to, yeah. Yeah – I remember, she changed it a week before we set off. You know her?”

Asher nodded. “She was my professor in engineering. Two years ago.”

Aleks made an “oh” noise, and continued to eat.

James finished his cake and stood, beginning to move his plate to shove in the sink. He was surprised by the amount Aleks had decided to share. It was like he had woken up a different man.

“Where’s Lindsey and Brett?”

Asher looked up at him. “In the lab, I think. Want me to call them in?”

“Nah, that’s okay. Just give me a second, I’m gonna let them know we’re good to go on that spacewalk,”

“Okay,” Asher replied.

James looked at Aleks, who was still chewing a piece of cake, staring fixatedly down at the surface of the counter. He didn’t look well. He made a note to ask him if he _actually_ wanted to go fix that satellite. Then he left the room and walked down the hallway towards the lab.

The lab was, unsurprisingly, huge. It must’ve been double the size of the living space, although the amount of counters and shelves and random shit made it seem a lot more crowded when James shimmied his way between two counters, almost knocking over two separate beakers of a blue liquid. The lab felt strangely quiet.

“Lieutenant?” He called out, pausing to look at what he could only guess was part of the Hermes. It looked like a mini-engine, smeared in oil. He guessed this might be where Asher had set up his workspace.

“Yeah?” came a distant response, and James began to walk towards the source of the noise. It turned out Lindsey and Brett were in the medical room, which was a smaller room connected to the lab. It was still pretty huge, and led to an even smaller room comprised of just a desk and two chairs, that they called the breakdown room. It was the psychiatric test room, essentially, and it had a double sided mirror in it Brett thought James didn’t know about. But Brett and Lindsey were just in the regular medical room, a sterile white room filled with hospital beds, curtains, defibrillators, hell, even frozen organs. Just in case.

The two were leaning over a lab table, Brett scrawling down notes on a pad and Lindsey quietly talking.

“Hey,” James greeted, and they stopped to look at him, two pairs of eyes with the immediate expression that he caught them in the act of… something. “What’s goin’ on?”

“Nothing,” Lindsey replied, turning fully and leaning back against the table. “How’d you sleep?”

James averted his eyes. “Fine. Had some weird nightmare,” and he tried not to overthink Brett noting that down. “But okay. Did you sleep okay?”

“Oh, yeah. Great. But you realise you woke up late this morning, right?”

“Uh, yeah. I mean, I set an alarm, but…” Had that been a dream too? Shit, he didn’t know anymore.

“Mm-hm. Went to go wake you up,”

James closed his eyes. He knew what this was about.

“Listen, James,”

“Lindsey, it’s not-“

“Hey,” he stopped, and looked at her. Lindsey had her hands on her hips, eyebrows furrowed. Her hair was tied back today, he noticed. She barely ever did that. “I don’t care – I don’t. But if you ever, and I mean, _ever_ , even _think_ about compromising the safety of this crew for Aleksandr, a man who, as far as we know, is a total enigma,” she inhaled sharply. “I will fucking kill you.”

Brett, from behind her, gave a solemn nod.

“Got it,” he forced out.

“Good,” she turned away and grabbed the notepad Brett was using, flipping it shut and using it to gesture to James. “What’d you come in here for?”

“Uh, I was just gonna let you know that we were ready to start tryin’ to fix that satellite,” he shifted his feet. “I think Asher and Aleks were gonna go out and do it.”

Lindsey raised an eyebrow. “Aleks is gonna do it? Really?”

“Yeah, I mean-“

“No – no. I want you and Aleks to go out,”

James sighed. “Why?”

“Because Aleks has incessantly attacked this crew and it seems to me, at least, that you’re the only one that he,” she paused then, seeming to struggle for the right words. “Trusts, I guess,”

“Yeah, okay,” James scoffed, “Do I have to remind you that I’m literally the only one he’s attacked?”

“The point is,” Brett cut in, “You’re the one he’s least likely to kill.”

James huffed, and then shrugged. He didn’t really care about whether he did the spacewalk or not. He just wanted to get the whole thing over with. “Fine, whatever. Let’s just get started,”

They got into the airlock at precisely three in the afternoon. James stepped in first, followed by Aleks, in the clunky spacesuits. Aleks fiddled with his glove as James pressed at various buttons on the wall, eventually entering the passcode to open the exterior door and drain the oxygen. He made sure not to let Aleks see the password. Just in case. Just before he entered the code, though, he turned and placed careful hands on the base of Aleks’ helmet and twisted, sharply, making sure it was firmly on. One satisfied, the code was entered, and the oxygen drained. Once it reached zero percent, the door hissed open, and then they were in deep space.

Neither of them had been given the jetpack, so it was with a slight huff that James clasped his tether to the rail running along the Hermes and began to do some strange imitation of a horizontal abseil across the ship’s exterior. He was closely followed by Aleks, who moved along in silence, steady breaths becoming static in James’ headphones.

“Okay, you guys at the satellite yet? Over,” Asher asked through the comms system. His voice was fading in and out, annoyingly enough.

“Faint. Over,” James replied instead of answering the question, and he waited for a response through the fumbling on the other line.

“How do you copy now? Over,” Asher asked, and the quality was only slightly better.

“Uh… readable. Advise intentions. Over,” He had reached the satellite now. It wasn’t a dish satellite like the ones on Earth, no. The satellite was a huge structure connected to the Hermes, with two broad wings extended. James observed what of the exterior he could see, but there was no visible damage at all.

“Okay, I need you to find the primary functional panel, over.”

James sighed, “Could I get a description? Over.”

“Has warning tape on the side, pretty huge. Unmissable. Over.”

James saw it now, a huge door with a thin strip of yellow-and-black electrical tape plastered over one side of it. He turned the valve with ease, and the door popped open, revealing a huge midst of wires and switches. “Got it – over.”

“Good, okay. Look for any malfunctioning wires, or anything… you know, sketchy, over,” his voice was breaking up again, but James elected to ignore it and instead rummage through the cables, searching for anything that could have gone wrong. There wasn’t anything. There was a moment where James thought a blue cable was split, but it was just twisted oddly. He grumbled and pushed it back into the nest of wires. Aleks watched intently.

“I can’t _really_ see anything wrong. Over.”

“…Okay,” Asher started. “Try looking at the-“

The radio cut out.

“Asher? Say again. Over,” he tried, and counted the seconds down. It was protocol to wait fifteen seconds before calling back, just in case something of higher priority had occurred. Like someone dying, he guessed. He wasn’t sure what else would be more important.

The fifteen seconds were over. This was serious. “This is Missions Specialist James Wilson, transmitting in the blind. Requesting expedite return to the Hermes,” he breathed. “Over.”

Shit, they were out there, alone. He turned to look at Aleks, who was watching him with fearful eyes. “Can you hear me?” James asked softly.

“Yeah,” he responded breathily.

Okay. So he wasn’t totally alone.

“We’re gonna be okay. Maybe just a bit stuck, so, uh, preserve that oxygen.”

“Yeah, okay,” he mumbled, hands flexing on the tether he had been gripping onto. “Sips, not – shit., what’s it?” He paused. “Gulps.”

“Yeah, that’s it. Sips,” James said dumbly, trying to look back at the panel. They stood there for a moment, James glancing to the screen on his forearm occasionally. He had 90% oxygen left. He would be fine. Probably.

“This is James Wilson, transmitting in the blind, requesting _expedite_ return to the Hermes, assholes,” he tried again. The panic was setting in, he thought. He looked towards Aleks, who was staring blankly ahead, and _definitely_ not sipping. “Hey, Aleksandr. Sips, not gulps,” he reminded, and Aleks turned his head to look at him. His eyes were wide, mouth slightly agape, and the _dark_ was back, glistening in his eyes like pools of tar that were just waiting to eat James alive.

“Fuck, are you hyper-fucking-ventilating or some shit? Aleksandr, man, get it together,” James snapped, but only because Aleks’ horrified stare was contagious, and his hands were starting to shake. “Goddamnit, okay,” He cleared his throat. “Mayday, mayday, mayday, Hermes, requesting rescue without delay. I say again, requesting-“

“James, stop,” Aleks finally spoke up, and his voice was suddenly calm, calmer than James had ever heard him.

“Wha – what?” James asked, obviously caught off guard, so much so that his hands loosened on the tether and he floated backwards for a moment, fumbling at the robe. He caught it, but his feet were separated from the surface of the satellite, and he was free-floating. His legs slowly rose behind him as him and Aleks regarded eachother, finally, as equals. It was a funny thing, being free-floating. On board the Hermes was one thing, but being in actual space, where there are no walls to push off of and no doorways to glide through, was a whole other thing. James could see the Earth from the corner of his eye, and he felt like it just may engulf him at any moment.

He started to move, climbing his way back to the Hermes.

“You’re too fuckin’ far gone, James, and I’m so, so, fucking sorry I didn’t come get you earlier, holy shit,” Aleks rambled, and his voice was breaking, so close to being tearful. James could barely see his face through the helmet, through the bright reflection of the Earth, but it was crumpled up, chin wobbling and eyes moving erratically.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” James cried, voice embarrassingly high pitched, almost a wail. “You died, Aleks! You died fifteen years ago, and I’m _sorry_ , okay? I’m sorry you came back and I’m sorry you’re a fucking ghost, or some shit, but you need to let go!”

He stopped climbing.

Aleks was  reaching for the clip of the tether, connecting him to the Hermes.

A burst of static came through the headphones, but no voice.

“Aleks, Aleksandr, just – what do you mean?” He yelled, trying to distract Aleks before he left him to suffocate in the deep expanse of space.

“You won’t believe me,” Aleks replied, huffing out a mix between a laugh and a cry. “You won’t,”

His thumb was on the clip.

James began to move again, frantically climbing up the tether, “Try me!” He yelled, and then Aleks stopped. James stopped moving too.

He watched Aleks slowly move his hands to his own tether, and his feet, firmly planted on the surface of the craft, were pushed off with a slight bend to his knees. He watched as Aleks drifted through the air, and he considered rushing ahead and unclipping Aleks and ending this shit for good, but Aleks was at him now, and his hand was on James’ arm, and he was being gently turned to look at Aleks. Their helmets hit eachother and for a moment James wanted to laugh, but Aleks was staring at him, and he sobered quickly.

“This, uh, isn’t real, okay?” Aleks began, and James _wanted_ to sigh, to push him away, to get back to the Hermes, but he just listened. “You’re not real. No, you _are_ , but this you isn’t real.”

James whispered a quiet _what_ , mouth parting. Aleks was… fucking crazy, after all.

“Listen, okay? I didn’t die in nineteen-ninety-whatever, I’m, uh, I’m alive, and I’m real, and we know eachother, okay? In real life, we know eachother.”

“In real life?” James repeated softly.

Aleks impatiently huffed. “In – in, you know, the real world. _This_ , this right here,” and he poked at James’ chest, “is not real. You’re not a fucking mission specialist, you didn’t go to MIT or wherever-the-fuck, you are not the protagonist of some shitty sci-fi, and you are _not_ James,”

“You… you’re crazy,” James whispered, but his heart was thrumming in his chest. His head hurt.

“The James I know is a total fucking asshole with a goddamn dog and a useless degree in computer science or some shit, right? You live in Los Angeles, you live five blocks away from me, but we never even met before – before,”

And he paused, frowning.

“I don’t have a dog,” James murmured, because he could only focus on one thing at a time right now.

Aleks coughed, and his body exploded in a twitch of bright pink, and James startled back, hands pushing away from the empty spacesuit for a moment. He watched the shell float away before a sudden light flashed, and then Aleks was back, hands and legs lashing and kicking before he seemed to gather his surroundings. He looked perplexed, and he looked at James with suddenly weary eyes.

“Hey, man, did you push me out here? Not fuckin’ cool,” he said, eyes squinted into a laugh as he began to tug at the tether and reel himself back to the Hermes.

“Aleks?”

“Yeah, what’s up?” he replied, like nothing was wrong.

“What… what do you mean?”

Aleks turned to look at him with his mouth twisted into a confused smile, one eyebrow raised. Hesitantly, he seemed to assess the situation, and raised a hand. He pointed at James first, and then moved his fingers to touch his index and thumb together to enclose a circle and to spread the others out.

_Are you okay?_

James stared at him.

And then, with a strength he didn’t really know he had, he tugged himself back to the tether, planting his feet firmly onto the surface of the satellite, turned towards Aleks, who was still smiling at him with a ‘nothing-is-wrong’ grin, reached ahead, and unclipped his tether. Aleks startled, but the sluggish movements through zero-g couldn’t stop James who, with a sloppy thrust of his arm, shoved Aleks away, untethered into space.

At that moment, James pushed off the satellite and outstretched an arm. Aleks, in a panic, gasping breaths of air and yelling incomprehensibly, fumbled for his arm and managed to grab on tight enough so that James’ tether was pulled taught, and their arms were interlocked, helmets pressed up against and clunking into each other.

“What the fuck!” Aleks exclaimed, and there was real betrayal, real horror in his eyes. The _dark_ was gone.

“Tell me what the fuck to do,” James demanded.

“What?”

The static came through in a loud burst, making both of them wince. The squabbling of the other three crew members came through simultaneously, overran by Lindsey asking,

“What the hell is going on?”

James frowned, trying to concentrate. He felt like all his thoughts were slipping away.

“Wouldn’t it just be easier to relax?” CEVA asked. “James, you must relax.”

That would be easier.

But everyone was yelling, and Aleks was right there, and his carbon dioxide alarm had just gone off, a loud ringing in their ears, and he was suffocating, that was clear, eyes bulging out of his head and cheekbones hollowing with every desperate breath for air.

“James, you need to calm down and let go,” CEVA said.

Let go.

He began to loosen his grip on Aleks’ hand.

The flash of pink emerged, and the spacesuit was empty for a fraction of a second, and then Aleks was frantically grabbing at him, at his shoulder, at anything.

“Fuck, fuck, holy shit, do you trust me?” Aleks gasped, and the alarm seemed to be getting louder.

James’ own alarm went off. How had that happened?

James stared at him, heart bouncing in his chest.

“James, man, do you trust me to save your fucking life?”

Aleks was leading James’ hands to his own helmet, hands clasped in James, his only tether. James felt the base of his helmet faintly through his gloved fingertips.

“I trust you,”

Aleks nodded, and he was turning pale, and maybe slightly blue. But he wasn’t struggling anymore.

“Okay, okay,” he breathily said.

And then he let go, drifting away dreamily, eyes fixed to James.

“On my mark,” he murmured, and James was dimly aware that the static had stopped. They were alone, finally. 03 and 07.

Aleks moved his own hands to the base of his helmet, and he was drifting, further and further.

“Three,”

_Aleks smiled at him from across a small dining room._

“Two,”

_They played cards in James’ bunk. He only let Aleks win once or twice._

“One,”

_Aleks squeezed his hand between psychiatric exams._

“Mark.”

Two neon red wavelengths separated.

The helmets clicked off.

And that was the end of oh-one and oh-seven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can find me @powellio on tumblr.


	4. unreadable

James awoke with a gasp, suffocating.

He grappled for breath for what felt like hours, fighting the sharp ache in his heart with harsh scream-like breaths, so much so that he began coughing after a moment, and had to halt in his frantic breaths.

Then he realised he was blind.

Yes, the world around him was suddenly nothing but darkness, a horrifying pitch black environment that startled him so much that he jolted, hands shooting down to whatever he was seated on – a chair, judging from the cold leather that squeaked beneath his palms – and shoved himself back. His hands eventually rose to feel at his face, running over his nose, his temple, moving over his head to feel at his hair, now a short and cropped to the back of his head. He was aware of a prolonged beep from his right, annoying and loud enough that it seemed to pierce into his brain and worsen the headache forming there.

Then, he heard a door crashing open, and a large, dry hand was on his shoulder, forcing him to sit up straight amidst his cries of protest on behalf of his suddenly achy joints. A smaller hand pried at the outer corners of his eyes and he rose a feeble hand to intercept the action, but then something sticky was being peeled off and then he could see.

Sort of.

The world was blurry and shapeless, but he could almost make out his surroundings. The walls, it seemed, were a light shade of pink, and the floor a cold white. He could see two figures hovering over him, eventually joined by a third, and they were close, too close, so much so that he whined in protest and tried to recede back into the cool leather of the chair, but they were prodding at his arms and pressing medical instruments against his chest, and he was too tired to even fight back. So he let them. Whilst a hand stuck something on the back of his hand, he raised the other to feel at his head again. His whole head. His last memory had been this awful coldness and hotness simultaneously, like he had the flu or something, then this inconceivable pressure on the sides of his head, and then… nothing.

Aleks was right.

James stilled when a large hand was placed against his eyelid and the skin beneath his eye, forcing him to remain still and unblinking as a cold gel was squeezed into his left eye, followed by the right. It felt gross, and he grunted as he blinked rapidly, trying to evaporate whatever it was that had just been forced onto his eyeballs. But whatever it was seemed to have worked, because when he stopped blinking, the world was suddenly much clearer.

He was in a pink room, not unlike a hospital. The floor was tiled, a pristine white, and to his left and right were towering machines, with wavering lines and incomprehensible numbers displayed on them. And there were three people in front of him, none of which he fully recognised. There were no windows in the room, just a bright light above his head and the white seat beneath him. He tilted his head to rest his cheek against the seat, suddenly feeling too overwhelmed, and almost struck his face against a metal plate there. It was thick, and, unnervingly enough, had a clear burn mark emerging from the centre. A glance to his left revealed the same sight.

Yet another hand was prodding at his shoulder, and he squinted up at the offender. It was a woman, young and blonde with happy eyes but a stern expression. She had normal office clothes on, partially concealed by a pristine lab coat.

“James? James, can you hear me?” She asked, and he tried to place her accent. Canadian, maybe.

He struggled to speak for a moment, half-forgetting, but eventually managed a soft, “Uh-huh.”

“Okay, good. We’re gonna get you on your feet. It’s going to hurt a little, but not for long. Got it?”

James suddenly felt like a ten year old again at the doctor’s, getting a vaccine for something mundane or a blood test to make sure he didn’t have the awful disease his mom theorised he had.

“…Okay,” he stiffly said, but didn’t prepare for the suddenness of multiple pairs of hands ushering him to his feet. And she was right – standing forced an excruciating amount of pain to shoot up his body from his feet, and he sharply exhaled through his teeth at the sensation, but allowed them to practically drag him out of the room. His feet, socked but with no shoes, padded against the floor dully.

They made it out of the room and then he was being taken down a long corridor, the right of which was a long pink wall, and the left was a long glass window. He inclined his head to look out of this window, and found himself peering into what appeared to be a living quarters, marked with a large circular table surrounded by six chairs. Monitors poked out of corners of walls and were even embedded into walls in some spaces. Then the living space was cut up with a wall, and on the other side was a dark room.

This room was large, and empty aside from six chairs facing each other in a spacious circle. It was unnervingly clinical. Five people sat in those chairs, seemingly still asleep, and James scanned their faces, a hard task, given that they were all tilted downwards, like they were in a deep sleep.

Then he was being shoved into some sort of observatory room, with a large window peering into the entirety of the living space, separated only by the narrow corridor, with lab technicians silently scrawling down notes and watching wavelengths. They were watching the sleeping people. James was hurried through this room and into a room further back, with an unsuspecting mahogany door and a window, with the blinds cast over it. The door silently opened at a slight nudge.

A man sat behind a desk. He wasn’t exactly old, but was one of those people who always just seemed to look utterly exhausted. He regarded James with a tight smile, and wordlessly gestured for him to take a seat in the single armchair opposite his shiny white desk. James did, and realised that the pain in his legs had eased up significantly. The armchair was softer than expected when he sat in it.

The man was wearing a white lab coat, not unlike the people who had assisted him there, and was scrawling in a notebook silently. A plaque on his desk told James absolutely nothing, but spurred a strange sort of emotion in him, like dread mixed with a funny sort of nostalgia.

DR BURNS

He stared at it, eyebrows furrowed, until the man coughed, and he looked up.

“James R. Wilson,” he said shortly, looking to James as if for confirmation, which he got, when James curtly nodded. “You’re sort of an enigma, aren’t’cha?”

James startled, eyes shifting from side to side. “What?”

He waved off the question, and then nodded at the two nurses behind James, who had wheeled in a machine from the corner of the room and placed it to his right. “James, we’re just gonna hook you up to some medical stuff, won’t hurt a bit.”

Before he could even protest, patches were being stuck to his temples and his wrists, and he was right, it didn’t hurt, but it was definitely weird. It was during this process that James studied the sheer amount of cameras on the desk, in front of his face – how had he missed them? – all lined up. They were video cameras. He watched a nurse lean over and switch them on, one by one, and each time James regarded a blue light bouncing off the desk from behind him. A quick glance behind him amidst the other nurses’ protest identified the source – a set of nine monitors, stacked in a square, all bathing the room in a soft blue. They were pointed at his face, definitely. One at his mouth, another at his eye, another at the corner of his jaw. He frowned, and turned back to the doctor, who was opening up a file.

“Thank you,” he said softly, and James heard the door click shut. They were alone. “James, James. Buddy. I’m sure you have a lot of questions. But bear with me, and they will all be answered. Probably.”

James nodded wordlessly.

“Cool. Okay. So, you fell asleep around four days ago – fact is, we put you into a sort of sleep on account of your, uh,” He paused, raising a hand to gesture loosely. “You had a bad reaction to one of the trials. It was best. But less about that, I wanna know,” and then he clicked, a coy smile emerging on his face. “What did you see?”

James blinked, and startled at the sudden wave that emerged beside him. A glance  to the machine told him all he needed to know. It was a lie detector.

“Uh… I was in space,” he started, watching the doctor nod. “And I was fixing the Hubble.”

“The Hubble, huh? Interesting. Were you alone?”

“No, I was part of a crew. Lindsey, Brett and Asher,” he frowned. Saying their names made his chest hurt a little.

“Okay…” James watched him note that down in a small leather notebook he guessed he hadn’t noticed before. “And how long had you been up there?”

James squinted. “I don’t… remember.”

 “Could you try?”

James shrugged. “Somethin’ like eight months, I think.”

The doctor sniffed, and wrote that down too.

“And what woke you up?”

Aleks – said the part of his brain that wanted to be honest, that wanted to understand what was going on. But somehow he just couldn’t bring himself to talk about Aleks. Not now.

“I don’t know.” He stiffly said.

The doctor gave him a _look_ , like he knew that James was lying and, yeah, he probably did, but he didn’t say anything.

“Well, fine. So, you’re probably pretty confused, huh? Feels like a second ago you were, what, digging into the Hubble and now you’re back on Earth,” he opened up the file and scanned the first page. James could see a picture of him there – it looked official, like a school photo, or a passport ID. “And you’re probably experiencing some memory loss. It’s a short-term side effect. We’re lookin’ into it.”

James wanted to ask – a side effect of what? – but all he could focus on the pages being flicked through within the file.

“What do you remember about yourself?”

He thought for a moment. “I was born in Pennslyvania, I think.”

The doctor nodded. “Good, good. What happened after that?”

“I went to MIT,” James frowned. “I studied engineering.”

“Yeah, that’s a no. That’s _space_ James. I want to know about real James,”

“But…” and that was where he trailed off. How did he know he was the real James? This could be another trick, another dream, another whatever. It didn’t matter.

“Memory loss is a killer,” the doctor mumbled, more to himself, before clearing his throat and holding up the file to skim through it. “James, you were an IT specialist. You worked in an accountancy. You live in South California. Any of this sound familiar?”

It did, only slightly. He reluctantly nodded. “I have a dog.”

The doctor looked up and down the page. “So you do.”

They sat in silence for a moment, only interrupted when a thick buzzer noise rang through the room. James flinched, recoiling back into his seat, but the doctor only rose his head when the same nurse from before poked her head in the door.

“Sir, the participants will be ready for their review soon.”

“Yeah, yeah. Five minutes.”

James swallowed, and waited for him to say something. All the guy was doing was reading through the file.

“I have to be straight with you, James. You signed a waiver – a few waivers, actually – so it’s not like you have any sort of legal high ground over us, even if that’s the direction you wanted to take. And this research is harmless, and very important to myself and my colleagues. So I very politely ask of you to finish the trial.”

James stared at him for a moment. “…What is the trial?”

The doctor made a sort of ‘oh’ noise, and reached into his desk drawer again. He withdrew a syringe, capped, with a iridescent pink liquid wobbling around inside. He gently placed it on the desk.

“We are developing a drug – one we believe can eradicate all that bad shit from the world. Loneliness, sadness, depression, anxieties. All gone,” he leant back, and they stared at each other for a moment.

James thought about it.

“You’re fucking crazy,” he hissed, and stood to get the hell out of – wherever he was being cooped up. The cords connected to the pads on his head pulled taught, and he stumbled for a moment. Enough time for the doctor to speak.

“Where will you go?”

“What?”

He leant back, eyes amused. James glowered. “No memories. No home. No job. That you know of, anyway. Where will you go?”

That made James pause, and lower himself back down into his chair. It was true. He had nowhere to go. And if what he was saying was true, that this whole memory loss deal was only temporary, he had no reason to leave. They were only drug trials. Pharmaceutical stuff. Harmless. Helpful.

He spared a glance to the syringe on the desk, and sighed. “How long of the trial is left?”

“Exactly a week,”

“…Fine.”

And then the nurses were calmly stepping in again and unsticking pad after pad from his head. James didn’t let them touch him this time. They guided him to a sleek glass door leading to the living quarters, and before he went in, they scanned him with some sort of device three times before nodding him in. A plastic ID card was pressed into his open palm, and he half-heartedly clipped it to his front pocket. The living quarters were empty, for the time-being.

They were odd. A spacious room bathed in cold, clinical light, populated by a circular table and six chairs. The walls appeared to open into cots of sorts, like sleeping pods, private only by the thin curtain cast over them individually. These pods were hexagonal in shape, and although James couldn’t look into them, he could tell that although they weren’t cramped, they weren’t entirely the pinnacle of luxury.

He stood there, motionless, until a door opened to his right – the sleeping room. That was what he had started to call it in his head, anyway.

A young woman walked out first – short and blonde, with bright eyes despite their impending tiredness. She looked genuinely surprised to see him, but didn’t say anything. She just offered him a quaint smile and walked past him, sitting at the table, hands folded on the table top. Next was a tall guy who didn’t even look at James and just followed the woman out to the table, sitting one seat away and folding his arms in what looked like annoyance. Then followed a similarly short woman, with dark hair this time. She nodded at him and sat down wordlessly. James watched her for a moment, almost unsettled by her stoic nature. Then he turned back, and was face-to-face with a dead man.

“Don’t,” Aleks firmly whispered, and walked past him to sit next to the dark-haired woman.

James watched him go, eyebrows raised and mouth slightly agape. Aleks didn’t even spare him a second glance. So, it was with reluctance and maybe a little resentment that James followed the rest to the table and sat between the tall man and the blonde woman, startling when the monitor above his head jingled loudly.

The screens were flashing animated purple text against a dark background, simply stating ‘TEAM-BUILDING’. James frowned. He wasn’t sure he wanted to build a relationship with anyone in this room. Apart from Aleks. Maybe.

The speakers crackled. “Welcome, participants. Team-building is our way of making sure you all feel comfortable with your fellow partakers, and also a way to fulfil your social needs during our stay. Due to an odd number, we will place you a team of two and a team of three. 01 and 05, the pair. 07, 04, and 02, the three. Please find seats together,”

James studied the ID cards on everyone’s uniforms for the first time. Aleks was 07. The tall guy was 04. The dark-haired girl was 02. The blonde woman was 05. He was 01.

Everyone was already shifting seats, and soon enough Aleks was placed between his two teammates on one side of the table, and James with his.

“Good work. The task is not competitive. We want you to tell your partners about your previous life, before the trials. Any talk about the trials is prohibited. Do _not_ discuss the effects of the drug or what you have seen. Have fun!” Then the speaker cut out.

There was a heavy silence in the room for a moment, and then the dark-haired woman said something that made Aleks laugh under his breath, followed by the tall guy saying something in a high nasally voice. The other team talked comfortably enough, albeit a few uncomfortable paused.

James turned to his partner, who smiled anxiously. Then she scoffed with the same smile. “Bullshit task, right?”

“Ah, yeah,” he replied stiffly, eyes not quite meeting hers.

“My life, huh? Not much to say there. I was born up in Canada. I live in LA, though. I’m a vet, which is cool, I guess. I don’t know.” She stiffly said. “You know, my parents told me not to do this. They were all like,” and then she scrunched up her face and made her voice some awful impression of what an adult would sound like from the perspective of a five year old. “ _Elyse, you’ll regret this! Don’t you do it!_ ” And then she reverted back to a normal tone. “Startin’ to think I should’ve listened.”

James smiled wryly. “Yeah. Me too.”

She hummed in acknowledgement, and then lowered her voice. “So, hey. You disappeared for a bit back there on account of your little outburst, huh? What happened?”

“What?”

“You freaked out, man. After we completed phase one. You panicked and demanded to go home or something, saying you were gonna shut this all down. They just whisked you away.”

James blinked. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” and then a nurse walked by. Elyse straightened up, trying to look as casual as possible. “So, what about you? What’d you do for a living?”

“Oh, I, uh. I work – I _worked_ in IT. I… have a dog.” He said lamely, arms folded across his chest now in discomfort. He had been lied to.

“Uh-huh. What else?”

And James really tried to think, he really did. He wanted to know what had brought him here. But then something occurred to him – a sort of series of memories that flashed through his mind. The interior of an office. A stern man with a tie and a fixed glare. A dog scuttering around his legs. A bonsai tree in his shaky hands, soil falling through the spaces between his fingers. Punching a wallpapered wall.

“I think I was sad.”

She nodded sympathetically, but James didn’t miss the slight flash of confusion in her eyes. “Hey, that’s why we’re here, right?”

He looked up at her. “What?”

“The… trials. They’re geared towards people who are, I don’t know, dissatisfied with life, or something like that. We all did the welcome test, remember? With the pictures, and the lie detector, and that creepy old lady? Apparently, they chose the – what was it? – the weakest subjects, or whatever.”

James did remember, sort of. He remembered looking down into a slide projector, seeing a stock photo of a family eating dinner. Remembered his heart aching as he stiffly said ‘Family’, and when the woman requested he answer with an emotion, like all those previous pictures, he forced out a grim, ‘Loneliness’.

“Yeah, I guess I kinda remember that.”

“So, were you born here?”

“Uh, no. Pennslyvania,” he mumbled. That he remembered – it had been the same on the Hermes.

She nodded. “Cool. You know that guy, over there. I, uh. I’ve forgotten his name,”

James followed her gaze to Aleks, who was softly nodding along to something the girl was saying.

“Aleksandr,” he said gently, and he glanced towards James at the mention of his name, looked away, and then almost did a double take when he realised James was looking back at him. They stared at each other across the table, and Aleks’ eyes were so soft and full of longing for just a moment that it hurt him, but then they hardened, and Aleks turned away abruptly. James looked away too.

“Yeah. He’s from Russia. Told me last week. Pretty cool, huh?”

“…Yeah.”

Then a buzzer sounded, and it was rec time. Again. The table seemed to break away quickly, as if everyone just scrambled to avoid anymore human contact, which, to be fair, seemed reasonable in this case. James sat still for a moment as Elyse went to retrieve what he could presume was a book, followed by the guy, who began to play cards with the brunette girl using an old pack he half-suspected had been smuggled in. Aleks departed immediately and went to his bunk. Again.

There were also two nurses beginning to patrol the living quarters, ones he had never met. They were, on-the-whole, minding their own business, tidying up bookshelves and watering plants.

James kept an eye on them, waited for the coast to be relatively clear, and crossed the room in strides that probably looked more confident than he felt. He reached the bunk, reconsidered, then re-reconsidered, squatted down and pushed back the curtain to crawl inside. The bunk was big enough to sit up in, which was less claustrophobic than once thought, and Aleks was doing exactly that, hunched up against the farthest wall, Rubik’s Cube turning over in his hand. He didn’t say anything when James arrived, just watched him take a seat and push the curtain back.

They stared at each other.

“Thought you were dead,” James said first, just as a way to break the silence. The corners of Aleks’ mouth perked up at that, but he looked away, eyes still vacant.

“You can’t die in a dream,” he responded, voice perfectly still. James frowned at him.

“Didn’t feel like a dream to me,” he sighed, casting a quick glance to the curtain. “I didn’t say anything about you, you know.”

Aleks looked at him then, Rubik’s Cube still in his hand, mid-turn. “…Thanks.”

It didn’t matter if that was genuine or not.

“Hey,” James started, and Aleks only had time to look a little annoyed before he was speaking again. “Do you know why I’m here? They wouldn’t tell me, like, anything in there. I don’t remember anything from before the Hermes… dream.”

Aleks blinked, and then the cube was being dropped onto the mattress. Only one side – the red side – was completed. James found his gaze stuck to it, partially because he could just feel Aleks’ eyes on him, could practically feel in the tension in the air.

“Yeah, in the dreams, you don’t – I guess – you don’t remember anything else. You just like, have this life, and that’s all you know,” he shrugged. “And I mean, you didn’t tell me much about yourself,” Aleks said slowly, hands fiddling with each other. “I think you, uh, lost your job.”

James felt oddly disappointed at that. Losing a job he didn’t even remember having. And there was something else beneath the sinking feeling in his chest – something that felt oddly exposed. He didn’t like someone else, especially someone who was supposedly a near-stranger like Aleks, knowing more about him than he knew about himself. It was weird. He lowered his head slightly and hunched his shoulders, fingers digging into the leg of his jumpsuit. Aleks seemed to sense this, and picked up the Rubik’s Cube, tossing it gently in James’s direction. It landed a small distance from his left foot.

“Hey, you think you could solve this?”

“What?”

“The, uh - fuckin’ – I dunno what it’s called. The cube. Can you do it?”

“I don’t know, man. Probably not.” He picked it up anyway, turning it over.

“Try,” and for some inexplicable reason, James did, flipping over sides of the brightly coloured block. He managed to get two whites together on one side. Aleks watched him intently.

“Why are you here?” James mumbled, focusing on trying to get another white square in the same row. He twisted it horizontally, vertically, and – fuck. They were on three separate sides now.

Aleks paused, and James could see him shift out of the corner of his eye. “I don’t…” he trailed off. “I don’t really wanna talk about that.”

That was unfair.

“Is this, like, some kinda fucked up community service thing you got roped into doing?” James pressed, and Aleks made a huffy sort of laugh, eyes crinkling slightly.

“Something like that, yeah.”

James hummed, and held up the cube in triumph. He had completed one white side all whilst completely fucking up Aleks’ red side. He flipped the cube in his hands, observing the patterns, feeling Aleks’ eyes on him. Then one of his hands slid into view and gently took the Rubik’s Cube from him. James let it go, and watched Aleks flip it over in his hands. He seemed to be mulling over saying something, mouth opening and closing soundlessly.

“James, look-“

The curtain slid open.

The face of a very angry nurse came into view, eyes narrowed and mouth turned downwards in what could only be described as a snarl. “What are you two doing? Strictly no co-habitation at any time. Get out,” she ordered, and James cast a look to Aleks before edging out, landing on the ground and wincing in the sterile light, a stark contrast to the soft golden light of the bunk. Aleks followed him, stumbling slightly when he landed on the ground and balancing himself with a sudden hand to James’ back.

There was no shock, no heat, no cold, nothing. But it made James turn his head to look at Aleks, face still in surprise from the near-fall. He retracted his hand almost instantly, but it made James’ heart beat a little faster. Aleks mumbled a ‘sorry’, and stepped out from behind him to retreat to a seat by the table. James looked up. The monitor was displaying a countdown to mealtime. 3 minutes and 43 seconds to go. He looked back down, and eyed the chair next to Aleks. He didn’t want to crowd him. But he had nobody else.

He crossed the floor and sat down quietly, avoiding Aleks’ gaze. From where they were sitting, they could see into the observation room. That was odd. He would’ve guessed that they would have some sort of one-way mirror system. But he could see directly into the room. It was glowing in a soft pink light – he wasn’t a fan of the weird neon lighting in this place – and was inhabited by around eight scientists, including the doctor James had spoken to. He was standing close to the glass, staring right back at James. James averted his eyes. Behind the doctor was the blonde woman, who was smoking with one hand and sipping from a mug in the other. The rest were seated, scrawling on paper or typing away at clunky monitors.

“Participants – two minutes until meal time. Please take your seats,” alerted the chipper computer, and James flinched. Aleks seemed to notice.

“That’s CEVA,” James mumbled, in some half-explanation.

“Who?”

“The AI on the Hermes.”

“Oh. Yeah. It must’ve slipped into the dream, or something,” Aleks suggested. James didn’t feel that was right, but he softly murmured an agreement. Aleks turned his head when the brunette girl took a seat beside him, but then looked back at James who, seemingly unbeknownst to himself, was looking more lost by the second, eyes cloudy and mouth downturned. “Hey, man, you okay?”

James shook his head. “What about the crew? Lindsey. Is she real?”

Aleks looked like he had run out of reassurances, so, begrudgingly, he shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

James smiled, but it wasn’t real. Aleks pretended not to notice the welling of tears in his eyes when he looked back down at the table top, finger tracing the marble pattern. “It just sucks, y’know. They were my friends. Now I have nobody.”

Aleks opened his mouth to say something, but then a strict buzzer sounded, and then the two nurses were bringing out bowls of food. It looked plain enough. Steaming rice with various vegetables mixed in. James started eating immediately, forking brightly coloured vegetables into his mouth in some odd attempt to avoid anymore conversation with Aleks. And he pretended not to notice Alek’s hand ghosting over James’ free hand, resting on his knee, for a fraction of a second, hovering as if he was considering grabbing his hand and never letting go. His hand dropped back to his own lap. James squinted at the table, trying to blink away the sudden  blurriness in his eyes.

Then mealtime was over. The monitors chimed that ‘Evening Trials’ was to commence shortly, and then they were being ordered to stand in numerical order outside the door. Once that was done, the door opened silently and they stepped in one-by-one, each receiving a scan with some sort of instrument beforehand. When James got in first, and found a chair labelled with an overhead plaque of his number directly to his right. He approached it as the next participant entered, and sat down. It was the exact chair he had been placed in before, when he woke up. The leather squeaked beneath him as he shuffled to lean against the back, feet on the leg rest. The metal plates by his head still made him nervous.

Aleks walked in last, and was seated at the seat next to the seat opposite James. A few around the room remained empty, unexplained gaps in numbers. James guessed they hadn’t been the lucky ones.

The jingle played again, followed by the doctor’s voice coming through. “We’re going to start shortly. Please remain still and calm as we administer your dosages.”

This time five separate scientists entered the room, all armed with the syringes filled with pink liquid. They all stood by a respective chair. James flinched when his assigned scientist, a broad man with a beard gently took his arm. James looked away, and squeezed his eyes shut when the sharp pain came from his upper arm. He opened them when the pain dissipated, and looked into the observation room, this time much clearer up—close, staring at the condescending scientists there, all fiddling with dials and the like.

The nurse pressed a sticky pad to his other arm and then departed, along with the others.

James startled when the chair began to whirr slightly, metal plates suddenly making him feel more claustrophobic than ever.

“Please rest your heads against the seat,” James did so, closing his eyes and trying to ignore whatever was making his stomach flip in anxiety. He felt sick. He couldn’t do this. What if he got stuck again? He would be lost forever. He opened one eye to look at Aleks, who was reclining back, eyes closed. “Prepare yourselves for phase two of the trials. Good luck, everyone.”

James closed his eyes, counting backwards in his head. He remembered doing that in hospital when he was younger, a faint memory that felt centuries old.

Ten

Nine

Eight

Seven

He drifted away.

-

_‘There’s a land that I heard of – Once in a lullaby…’_

“Turn that off, would you, Brett?” James asked from the backseat of the car, eyes fixed to the glimmering invitation in his hand, all blue décor and golden lettering. Typical, really. The piece of card was ornamental, to say the least. Gold ink traced along sweeping geometric design, joined to the name of the supposed receiver. Charles Whirlpool. It made him laugh when he retrieved it. _‘Who is this guy?’ He asked upon first receiving it. ‘Some mafia link. Retired now.’_ But he had taken it. It had cost him a pretty penny, too.

Brett reached from his place behind the wheel to turn the radio off, turning the dial with a gloved hand. From behind the driver partition, James could see the road ahead. It seemed to stretch on in one straight line for miles, enclosed by towering trees leading into dense forest on either side.

“You don’t like the song?” Brett asked, amusement edging into his tone.

“The picture has been out a year. How many times have you heard that goddamn song on the radio?” James shot back, a grin coming across his face.

Brett shrugged, matching James’ smile. “Who’s party, anyway?”

“Uh, some big-shot diplomat. He’s the one that I heard is meant to have the key to-“

“Oh, this is about the key again.”

“ _No,”_ James said, maybe too fast. He recomposed himself. “No. It’s not. This is about killing the guy on behalf of that client. The key is just a - you know - a side gig.”

“ _A side gig_ ,” Brett repeated with a huffy laugh. “Whatever you say,”

The radio crackled.

“It’s nice out here, huh?” Brett started. James fiddled with his white jacket. He had gone for a white tuxedo this time, slightly unconventional, but there was a chance he could make big money tonight. He didn’t intend to be wearing some cheap suit when he acquired his well-earned millions. “Fresh air. Nothin’ like the city.”

“Yeah, yeah. Guess so,” he mumbled, finally giving up on trying to cuff his sleeves like he had seen in a magazine just last week and instead looking through the windshield again.

His heart nearly stopped.

Up ahead, illuminated by the bright headlights, was a figure, walking down the middle of the road.

“Brett, stop the car. I think I’m seeing things.”

The car slowed to a stop, gravel crunching beneath the wheels. The headlights served to shine brighter on the figure, who was adorning a long, brown fur coat, black slacks, and the ugliest brown shoes James thought he had even seen. The figure seemed to sense the car had stopped, because they stopped too, feet coming together in a perfect stance.

They turned their head, and James caught the shine of gelled brown hair, the arch of a dark eyebrow, the line of a sharp nose.

Then Aleksandr Wilson was staring into the headlights of the car like a deer who had accepted it’s inevitable fate of being crushed beneath the wheels, wide eyes glinting like the stars in the sky.


	5. words twice

If James could pinpoint one second of his life that, he would argue, ruined it completely, it would be the moment he first saw Aleks, back in 1934. He had smiled at James, eyes crinkling as he put his hand out for James to shake, and they had joked about Aleks red jacket – the one that James tore the shoulder of precisely three hours later in some animalistic and mutual desperation to get it off.

But now, Aleks neared the car in wide strides, surpassing the harsh gleam of the headlights and stopping at James’ window. A single finger tapped the glass, and James closed his eyes, took deep breaths through his nose, briefly considered telling Brett to floor it, and reached down to lightly push the ‘down’ button. The window whirred, and lowered halfway before James sat back. Aleks grinned.

“Fancy seeing you here,” He greeted, and James refused to meet his eyes. Instead, he focused on the dip of Alek’s collarbone, the beginning of his chest tattoo between the unbuttoned top of his blue silk shirt, his hands gently resting on the top of the window, fingers idly tapping the interior glass. Aleks’ accent still hadn’t faded. It was still thick.

“Must be fate,” James replied, and that earned a harsh laugh out of Aleks, eyes crinkling. It had been some sort of inside joke, he thought. From a long time ago. He just couldn’t remember the actual joke. In some bid to distract himself from thinking too hard about stupid jokes from before, he glanced over Aleks. “You know you need an invitation to get in?”

He reached into the inside of his fur coat, and held out the same blue card between two fingers. James glimpsed the glint of golden lettering ‘Aleksandr Marchant’. He nodded. It was impressive – in his own name, too. Sort of.

“You changed your name?”

Aleks scrunched up his nose, and put the invitation back in it’s place. “It’s been two years.”

James nodded. “I know, yeah.”

Aleks grinned, and reached into the pocket of his slacks to retrieve a small gold tin. James had gotten that for him, when they were in Paris, sometime in 1935. He had bought it from a young woman at a florists stall, and given it to Aleks over breakfast. His throat tightened at the sight of it. Aleks flicked the lid open and retrieved a cigarette, placing it between his lips and offering the case to James, who shook his head. But Aleks still leaned in, and James, as if in a trance, reached into his own pocket to grab his lighter and leant closer to light the cigarette, watching as the warm yellow of the fire briefly illuminated his features, and then it dimmed, shrouding them in darkness once more.

Aleks inhaled, and then took the cigarette, holding it loosely between two fingers.

“Do you want to go together?” He asked calmly, and James flinched at the request although he knew it was inevitable. He thought for a moment. Realistically, Aleks was the last person he wanted to see here. He  _knew_ they were both here for the key – Christ, their honeymoon had been spent in the Dolomites looking for the goddamn thing – but he could use him. Aleks was good at what he did. And he would be lying if he said he didn’t miss him.

“Yeah,” James said, opening the door and stepping out. In the brief moment they were standing side-by-side, Aleks looked at him with some inexplicably raw expression, before the mask was put back on, and he was smiling coyly and stepping into the car, sliding across the seat to the other window. James followed, and closed the door.

“Hi, Brett,” Aleks said, and James caught the roll of Brett’s eyes as he responded.

“Hi. Having a good evening?” he asked, starting the engine again.

“It’s better now.”

James almost scoffed, but the movement of the car distracted him. He instead moved his head to look at Aleks, who was sitting with his back against the window, legs crossed and half-propped up on the seat between him and James. He was already staring at him, taking shallow drags of the cigarette in his hand, one side of his face illuminated by the moonlight softly coming through the window through the thick forest rushing by. James fixed him with a frown.

“What?” He demanded.

“Nothing. I’m just, uh, looking at you,” Aleks smiled again, and James really took him in. His shirt, silk and blue and ridiculously gaudy, half unbuttoned. His fur coat. The slight scuff on his left shoe. The strands of loose hair flopping onto his forehead. “I like the suit.”

“Oh. Thanks,” he felt pathetic - he could practically feel the blush creeping up from his collar. “Is that my coat?”

“Yeah. You gave it to me, remember?”

“…Not really. That cost me, uh, four-hundred dollars. You laughed at me when I brought it home, and you ripped the sleeve,” he didn’t say it to be spiteful. He said it more in some nostalgic recollection of their past, a past he hadn’t thought about since the last time he saw Aleks, storming from their shared apartment in a rage.

Aleks smiled faintly. “I got it patched up, though.”

“I know.”

Aleks took another drag of his cigarette, and then straightened up, free arm moving to brace against the seat as he shifted closer to James, until they were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, more or less. James turned to look at him, and then he looked into his eyes - against his better judgement. Aleks smiled at this, obviously pleased, and James swallowed at the thin hand that slinked over his knee, resting there.

James knew what this was. A distraction. And a good one. He knew he had to resist, had to focus on the task, had to not let Aleks affect him, but then Aleks was turning his head away to take a drag of the cigarette, and turning back to James to move his free hand and gently grip his jaw. James’ mouth fell slightly agape, and Aleks leant in, exhaling smoke easily, eyelids fluttering. James felt his hand move to grip at the fur on the jacket, and one hand fell on the soft silk of his shirt. He ran his hand down it.

Aleks grinned at him when he moved his head back slightly, and then the car stopped.

Brett cleared his throat. “We’re here,”

James squeezed his eyes shut, feeling embarrassment creep up on him, but it was quickly subsided by quiet regret when Aleks got out of the car quickly, opening the door for James, who stepped out, shoes crunching against the gravel underfoot. He looked up at the house.

It was bigger than he had anticipated. He knew this guy was rich, but Jesus. The house must’ve been around three storeys tall, and was all marble décor and free-relief sculptures, images of Greek Gods adorning every pillar. People were trickling into the open door, guarded by two men in suits who were carefully inspecting every invitation and nodding people in wordlessly. James felt rather intimidated by it all. But a turn to his left revealed a window into the main parlour, and he could see the guy, right there, drinking champagne and conversing with other equally important people. The key was in there. He needed it.

But before he even took another step towards the door, he walked around the car and opened Brett’s door. He looked at him with a furrowed brow, hands still resting on the wheel.

“Come in with me,” he requested, and Brett smiled.

“Sure. Want me to lock him in a bathroom?”

“Uh. Wow. Yeah, that’s exactly what I want you to do. Hurry.”

He watched as Brett removed his gloves and cap and stepped out of the car, looking up at the building with an unimpressed sniff and  trudging around the front of the car to stand beside Aleks.             James closed the door and looked at the two standing there, motionless, backs to him. They were mumbling something to each other. James stepped around the car to join them, and hardly resisted when Aleks slipped his arm to link with James, even though he looked at Brett, who shook his head at him. They neared the door and James retrieved his ticket to show the doorman, who took it and looked at James with unsure eyes, before waving him and Aleks in.

Brett was stopped. “He’s my chauffeur. Ah, let him in, won’t you?” and when the doorman hesitated, “Listen, I think the man deserves a drink after what he witnessed goin’ on in the back of that car.”

Aleks wheezed a laugh under his breath. Brett hid his face with his hand, but James could see his smile.

The doorman didn’t say anything, and fixed James with a stern look. James sighed, reached into his pocket, and pulled out his wallet. A hundred dollar bill was pressed covertly into the man’s palm and only then were they waved in.

The entrance hall was maybe more impressive than the exterior. A rich marble floor lay beneath their feet, opposed by a high, domed ceiling. Ahead of them was a grand staircase, which became the upper floor through a balcony overlooking the hall. People conversed over glasses of champagne up there. Aleks freed his arm to allow a caterer to take his coat, and then he was standing in his ridiculous blue shirt and slacks, sleeves rolled up to his elbows and chest unashamedly just… out there. James averted his eyes, and instead tried to find the nearest bathroom.

“You know, I hear that he keeps the key in his bathroom.”

Aleks blinked. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Eh. Friend of a friend.”

That seemed acceptable enough as an answer, because then Aleks was asking another caterer where the bathroom was, and she was pointing up the stairs. He watched Aleks stroll up without another word, and it was only when he reached the top that James nudged Brett.

“Follow him.”

Brett did, and then James was walking away, around the staircase and into a covert door beneath it. It was locked. He grimaced, glanced around him, and knelt down. He retrieved a pin from his pocket, one that he always carried, just in case, and slipped it into the keyhole. One point went into the bottom of the keyhole, pushing down, and the other jiggled inside, pushing up the pins carefully. It took him a minute, but the door clicked, and a push to the handle ensured that it opened. He peered inside, down at the narrow staircase there, leading into complete darkness, and swallowed.

He took the first step down, and the stair creaked beneath his feet. He shut the door behind him, and was engulfed in total darkness.

He took careful steps downwards, both hands firmly planted on the wall, lowering evenly each time he took a step, eyes twitching trying to identify something, anything, in the dark. His foot planted on something that didn’t creak. He had reached the floor. He shifted his foot, trying to feel for anything at all. He was pretty sure there was a rug beneath his feet. He stepped forward – and screamed.

Something had hit his face, something thin and rope-like and, oh god, he was sure that he had walked into some sort of trip wire and in seconds he was gonna get murked by a blazing arrow or a bear trap a thousand deadly venomous snakes dropping down on his head – but nothing happened. So, after a moment, James reached up and grappled at the string. He tugged it. The room was lit up.

He ran a hand over his face and sighed. Okay. He was far too jumpy. He parted his fingers to actually look at the room. It was spacious, and reeked of the stereotypical ‘secret lounge’. A chandelier on the ceiling, a huge liquor cabinet in one corner, a record player in another. A huge mirror, embedded in the wall, seemingly, copied James as he lowered his hand. The rug beneath his feet was a rich red, which perfectly matched the two loveseats and the single armchair in the middle of the room, all centred around a glass coffee table. The whole room was ridiculous. Apart from the mahogany safe on the far wall. James quickly crossed the room towards it, shimmying between one love seat and the coffee table to reach it. He knelt in front of it and pressed a hand against the cool door. It was locked with a simple combination lock, and he tapped it gently, before reaching into his jacket pocket, acting on a hunch. The invitation lettering glittered when he held it in the light.

Begrudgingly, he fished the lighter from his pocket, flicked it open, held it up to the card, and set it alight.

But James was an idiot, and by the time the flames were starting to lick his fingertips, he dropped it. Onto the rug. The _highly_ flammable rug.

He realised his mistake before it hit the floor.

The whole thing was a huge panic, really, James frantically trying to stomp out a quickly building fire, arms flailing and shrieking, failing to remember the importance of this entire ordeal being secret. In between one stomp and the final, the fire was smothered, and James watched as glowing embers gathered around the blackened remains of the envelope. Well, that was a doozy.

He stared down in disappointment until a glimpse of white emerged when a blacked piece of paper finally disintegrated. James frowned, and took a knee to gently nudge away the remains. The white was another card, that somehow hadn’t even been affected by the burning, so much so that he wondered if it had fallen from the ceiling, or something. He looked up, almost accusingly, to the wooden beams lining the ceiling.

The card was plain, with no writing, no decorum, nothing. James flipped it over multiple times, held it up to the light, looked at it from every single angle possible, stared at it so close his eyes started to sting. Nothing. He frowned. It must have had some sort of significance. Surely. Unless it was just some dumb fake sign. He glared at the card with clear resent and turned – right into a cold glass of whiskey.

James startled, arms jumping up and shoulder hunching, mouth parted in a silent shriek.

An unimpressed Aleks raised an eyebrow.

James cleared his throat, and took the drink, watching Aleks saunter over to the arm chair and sit in it, legs crossed and glass dangling from his finger tips over the arm. He didn’t say anything, just looked at James, then the burn on the rug, then back at James. His face broke into a smile.

“Did you kill my driver?” James asked, eyeing the whiskey tentatively. He never really liked whiskey, that was more Aleks’ drink. He remembered, on their first ‘date’ – which had really been a dual assassination job at a masquerade in Hong Kong, targeted at some British asshole, in which they staked out in the room above a carpenters and shot the guy point blank with a sniper rifle – that Aleks had bought him a whiskey in a bar, and he had to smile and nod through the taste before Aleks excused himself and James promptly pushed the glass as far away as possible.

“No, of course not,” Aleks defended.

“Then how are you here?” and James pretended not to notice the burst of pink static from his divorcees’ left hand, which was resting on his knee. He brought the whiskey up to his lips and took the smallest sip possible, eyes wandering across everything in the room aside from Aleks. Suddenly that record player was that much more interesting.

Aleks laughed. “I have a funny way of getting where I, uh, want to be. So to speak,” he almost mused, eyes rising towards the ceiling. James frowned.

“Yeah, I know. You kill the guy yet?”

“No. What’s with the – what do I even – the _burn_ patch?” Aleks gestured a loose hand towards the rug. “This is a nice fuckin’ rug.”

“It is _not_ ,” James argued, hardly noticing himself take haughty steps towards Aleks, who looked up at him expectantly. “And, look. Found this,” He held out the white card, and Aleks took it, flipping it over.

“It’s blank.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

Aleks handed it back. “Real helpful, really,”

“Fuck off, man. What have you got?”

“Nothin’ that wasn’t in the bathroom your guy locked me in.”

James shifted his eyes.

Aleks held a hand out to him, and James stared at it, eyebrows rising, like he was offended.

“I’ve missed you,” Aleks whispered, and it chilled him to the bone.

James, much to his own disgust, placed his hand in Aleks’, who gently pulled him forwards, until he was practically towering over him, knees resting on the seat surrounding Aleks’ legs, and free hand propped up against the back of the chair, between Aleks’ head and shoulder.

Aleks looked up at him. There was no snarky grin there, no sarcastic frown, no joke on the tip of his tongue. It was just the Aleks James half-remembered. The Aleks he woke up to making him burnt eggs, the one that brought him lunch during stakeouts despite James’ consistent rejection, the one who lightly kissed him in the alleyway between two Berlin restaurants, palms gently pressed against James’ chest.

James stares down at Aleks, and he wanted to kiss him again, more than anything.

Then Aleks glitched, and James jumped. He never got used to that, even in three years of marriage.

“Y’know this place is named after Narcissus?”

James blinked. “What?”

“Narcissus, that, uh, Greek guy. Stared at his reflection until he died because he just fuckin’ loved himself so much,”

“Wow, weird bedroom talk.”

Aleks scoffed. “No, asshole. My point is, this place is full of mirrors. You don’t think that’s weird?”

“…Not really. Rich people tend to like to look at themselves.”

“Oh my God. Just get-“ and then he pushed James, who stumbled back slightly. Aleks stood up straight and reached into James’ pocket, withdrawing the card again. Then he neared the mirror again, and held the card up. James neared him, standing a ways behind him, fully expecting literally nothing to happen, but then the mirror just made a small ‘ding’ noise. They both jumped, but it was Aleks who smiled, and looked at James in the mirror.

Then he placed a hand on the surface of the mirror, and _pushed_.

James’ heart leapt as the mirror surface swayed from side to side, before spinning in it’s frame like a revolving door. It spun it place for a moment, and James found himself moving to stand alongside Aleks, hand awkwardly wavering over his arm before dropping. Then he blinked, and the mirror had stopped. But it was different.

The reflection was them, sure, looking exactly the same. But they were no longer in a basement. Behind them was the entrance hall, in all it’s grandeur, lined with marble and lit by chandeliers, priceless works of art poised on the walls. It was empty, completely. In fact, when James listened, it was perfectly quiet. Aleks smiled.

 “What the fuck?” James barked, spinning on his heel as if facing the place properly would fix it.

“Of course,” Aleks breathed, and James could see the grin on his face. “It’s a fuckin’ mirror trick. Smoke and mirrors, or whatever.”

“What?”

“The key, it only exists here, right?”

James just stared at him. Aleks sighed, grabbed his hand, and pulled him further into the hall, until they were standing at the foot of the staircase. They looked at each other, and then James was being pulled up, nearly tripping over three separate steps. They made it onto the first floor, and Aleks whirled around as they paced down the hall. James felt like the paintings were watching them.

“It’s a mirror dimension, James,”

And then James stopped walking.

“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” he monotoned, hand running over his face.

“I know, I know. But this isn’t like Portugal-“

“This feels exactly like Portugal,”

“Just listen – there’s a safe in the master bedroom. It’s in there-“ and when James shook his head, “I’m sure of it.”

James groaned, eyes moving to stare at the plain white of the door to his left. Aleks watched him tentatively reach for the handle, and the door was pushed open gently. It was a guest bedroom, ugly and shrouded in purple, but what really stood out to James was the car where a bed should have been. It was a shiny grey, and far too futuristic, and the hood was leaking smoke. They both blinked at it. And then it exploded into flames.

James slammed the door shut.

“Okay. I believe you.” He stiffly said, suddenly feeling as though his throat had closed up.

“Bedrooms up here,” Aleks walked towards a set of double doors, painted a custard colour, with blue paint swirling around the handle. He placed both hands on the handles, and _pushed_. The doors swung open, bouncing on their hinges ever so slightly. The room was as extravagant as expected, all red and gold and a king-sized bed with posts, a silk veil obscuring it. A tall closet was pushed against one wall, and a balcony door opposite the bed led out onto a view of the front of the household. James wrinkled his nose up at it, but Aleks rushed in, and knelt before the safe. The safe was plain looking, so much so that James hadn’t seen it the first time. It was identical to the one in the basement. James moved to stand alongside Aleks, who was inspecting the lock. A combination one, of course.

“James, would you reach into my pocket?”

James squinted, but crouched down and carefully slipped a hand into Aleks’ front pocket. He pulled out the same cigarette tin, and held it in front of Aleks in disbelief. Aleks just parted his lips.

“You’re unbelievable,”

But he put a cigarette between his lips, and reached into his own pocket to light it, watching as Aleks gently bit down on the end in his mouth in concentration, humming his thanks. And then, after a moment’s pause, he lit a cigarette for himself, and put it in his mouth. They were celebrating, after all.

Then Aleks placed his hand on the lock, closed his eyes, and James watched his entire body flicker, disappearing for a moment before he arrived back again, twisted the lock rapidly and with surprising accuracy, and then the safe popped open.

James inhaled sharply, taking the cigarette out of his mouth as Aleks shuffled away, still on his knees. James reached forward, and pulled the door open. There it was.

Underwhelming.

It was a small key, painted a baby blue. He moved down and picked it up, twisting it over in his hand and not being able to contain his grin. He looked down at Aleks, who was smiling back, cigarette now between his fingers, smoke slowly filtering out into the stagnant air.

“Key to the world, huh?” He mused, and James didn’t answer, transfixed by the treasure. He had spent his entire life in search of this thing. Aleks stood and nonchalantly brushed off his slacks. “We better get back, you know. Kill that guy.”

He nodded.

Aleks put out his cigarette on the wall, leaving a considerable burn in the wallpaper, and squashed the cigarette with the bottom of his shoe before he began to leave, closely followed by James, who squeezed the key and shoved into his pocket. They quickly moved down the hallway, whisked around the stairs, and made it into the basement. The mirror was slightly pivoted, and this time James was the one to step forwards and gently push the surface, watching it spin. Then they were back in the world, loud chatter and the explosive orchestra bursting into life. He turned to look at Aleks, who was grinning, eyes all squinted and hands shoved in his pockets.

It was without a word that James took his hand, felt the familiar lines and dips, and then Aleks was pulling the cigarette out of his mouth and dropping it to grind it into the floor with his shoe. James watched him with steady eyes. And then one of Aleks’ hands was on his jaw, and he could feel Aleks’ hot breath on his face, and his hands moved to rest on Aleks’ waist.

The safety of Aleks’ gun going off was _such_ a mood killer.

James opened his eyes, and dropped his hands. Goddamnit.

Aleks was looking at him easily, gun pressed against his gut and finger poised on the trigger. His hand was already outstretched.

“Honestly… I’d be offended if you didn’t try,” James murmured, reaching into his pocket and dropping it into Aleks’ open palm, who sneered and shoved it into his own pocket.

“Thanks, honey,” he replied, and then the gun was gone. James had half the mind to tackle Aleks right there. He could smash his head into the stairs, watch him bleed out, take the key, and be gone. But he let Aleks go.

The gunshot upstairs and the subsequent screams hardly phased him.

He slipped out the kitchen door and stood on the gravel there, lighting himself a cigarette he had nabbed from Aleks. Once it was lit, he dropped the lighter back into his pocket, kicked at the gravel in some outlet for his misery, and started to move.

He circled the house until he was approaching the car, getting into the driver’s seat, and starting the engine. With a thud, he slammed his hand into the wheel. It killed his hand but at least it meant he felt something. He sighed. Took a drag of the cigarette. Put it out. Started to reverse.

He pretended not to see Aleks getting into his own car.

-

This time, James woke up slowly. His eyelids fluttered as he sluggishly regained consciousness. He was half-aware of the metal plates sandwiching his head being pulled back, and then he was being helped to sit up. Soon enough, though, the blurriness in his vision subsided, and, when he felt like he could _probably_ walk, he did. They were all led into the recreation area, and told that they would be entering the office one-by-one to recollect their experiences.

Aleks pulled him aside.

“You _can’t_ tell him we were together.”

“What?”

“That we were in the same dream, world, whatever. You have to make something up.”

“I can’t just- why?”

“Oh-one to the office, please. Oh-one, to the office!” The computer announced, and James flinched, already being ushered away by nurses. He caught Aleks’ nod on the way out. He didn’t return it.

Seconds later, he was dropping down in the same leather armchair from before, and was face-to-face with the same doctor. A sticky pad was being tacked to his temple, and the cameras were clearly on. They stared at each other for a moment.

“So, James, how did you find that?” the guy asked casually, like he was asking him about his lunch.

“Fine.”

“Just fine?”

“Yeah, I mean. It wasn’t anything spectacular.”

He noted that down. “Mm-hm. James, I need you to listen to me,” and he raised his head to stare at James, pen poised on the page, mid-word. “You are in phase two. Do you remember what phase two is?”

James shook his head.

“Yeah, I thought not. It’s our most intensive stage. We aim to complete two trials a day, one in the mid-morning, the other in the evening. Phase two is all about you understanding yourself. Why you are the way you are, so to speak, and how it… like, affects the world around you. We want you to see yourself as a caricature of what you make yourself. Right?”

James raised his eyebrows, brain half-struggling to keep up. “Uh… yeah.”

The doctor seemed satisfied with that answer. “You remember phase one?”

“No, not really.”

“Well, phase one was all about facing your trauma. Relieving the things that make you weak, so to speak,” he was flipping back through the pages of his notebook. “You witnessed…” he found the page, stabbing his pencil into it firmly. “You witnessed the day you moved out of your family home. You identified it as the beginning of your loneliness,” he inclined his head and flipped back to the current page. “It’s not uncommon, these sort of mundane hallucinations. You remember any of that?”

James thought, and he guessed he did. He remembered the smell of a new house, of carrying heavy boxes up flights of stairs. It wasn’t entirely foreign. He shrugged. “Yeah, kind of.”

“Okay, good. So, tell me. What did you see in this trial?”

James shifted his eyes from side to side, frantically trying to think of something – anything. He was getting a perplexed look from the doctor, who was impatiently tapping his pencil on the tabletop. “I was… in an arcade.”

It was jotted down. “Okay… tell me more.”

“I was in an arcade, and it was, like, the eighties. I think. And there was a , uh, a chicken I had to return to it’s owner. Yeah.”

It was the strangest lie he had ever told. But it seemed to work, because the doctor nodded. “Did you return it in the end?”

“…No. He didn’t want it.”

“Uh-huh. Okay,” and then he looked up, with the squeaky-clean customer service smile James had seen so many times before. “Thanks for your time, James. Just unstick that and head out the door.”

James mumbled a thanks of some sort and tugged the pad off his head, letting it dangle from the string as he pushed back his chair and started to walk away. The door was pulled open and the nurse standing guard, who was reading some sort of trashy magazine, looked him up and down before inclining his head towards the living space. James followed his gaze and stepped through the door, which opened at his presence, and closed behind him/

He took a moment to look around. The dark-haired girl walked past him, eyes cast to the ground.

Elyse smiled at him. “Hey, James. How was it?”

“Fine. Kinda weird,” he shrugged, already scanning the room for Aleks. She must’ve realised, because she didn’t say anything else.

Aleks was sitting in his bunk. James only realised because the curtain was slightly pulled open, enough for him to see the right side of him, still fiddling with that goddamn Rubik’s Cube. James crouched down and pulled the curtain back, before slipping in. He sat with his legs crossed on the mattress, back against the wall. Aleks was sitting with his back against the pillow.

“Do you spend all your time in here, or is it-“ He started, voice as upbeat as he could muster.

“What’d you tell him?”

“Some bullshit about an arcade and a chicken,” and when Aleks smiled smugly, “First thing that came into my mind, man.”

“Yeah, thanks.” It was quiet for a moment. “So that dream was, uh, fucking weird, right?”

James grinned, shaking his head.

“Weird story, yeah. Where do they even come from?”

“I think it’s kinda like dreaming. Like whatever your brain can salvage from stuff you’ve seen in the real world it makes a story from. I think.”

James thought about this, before Aleks spoke up again.

“Can’t believe we were married.”

“Can’t believe you threatened me with a gun,” and, when he tried to muster up a way to sound as casual as possible. “And tried to kiss me like four times.”

Aleks looked away, hands stilling suddenly. His voice cracked. “Sorry.”

James shrugged. It didn’t bother him, really. Well, no, it did, because Aleks was kind of the only person he had right now. He didn’t want to lose him.

“It’s fine, man. Wasn’t us.”

Aleks frowned. “Well, no, it was us. We were just, uh, kinda dropped into this fake life. Made to represent our – fuck, whatsitcalled – hamarti?”

“Hamartia,” James corrected, startling himself.

“Yeah. So, I guess you’re too trustworthy, or something. Or you love too much. I don’t know.”

James laughed, but it sounded fake in his ears. He hated being psychoanalysed.

“And you’re a liar.”

Aleks shrugged. “Yeah, man. I guess. You see the car?”

“Oh, what? Yeah, that was fucking weird.”

“They said elements of phase one could appear in these trials. I know – I knew that car.”

“That’s… your trauma thing?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“What happened?” He said it before he realised the intrusion of the question, and he was half-expecting Aleks to yell at him, to kick him out, or, worse of all, to push him away. But he stopped. Seemed to reassemble his thoughts. Opened his mouth to speak, and-

“Lights out!” Chirped CEVA, and the room was engulfed in darkness. James squinted at Aleks, who shrugged.

“You better go.” He whispered, and James nodded, and began to slip out, silently.

Before he left, something caught his eye.

The Rubik’s Cube lying on the mattress. Still unsolved.

Somehow he doubted they would ever figure it out.

**Author's Note:**

> there we go!  
> i hope you enjoy this silly au i thought up!  
> you can find me at powellio on tumblr, feel free to talk to me whenever! :)


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